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The story
A new report highlights a growing gap: as correspondence high schools (tsūshin-sei kōkō, part-time/distance-learning schools) rapidly absorb more students with a history of school refusal (futōkō), career-support systems at these schools haven’t kept pace. Even though the job-offer ratio for high school graduates remains a seller’s-market 3.6-to-1, a full 26% — one in four — correspondence high school graduates reportedly finish school with no set career path. On 5ch’s Breaking News+ board (ニュース速報+, one of the site’s main current-events forums), the thread split between harsh skepticism over whether correspondence-school students can hold their own in the workplace, and pushback arguing that plenty of people with a history of school refusal go on to become perfectly capable working adults. Some commenters also pointed the finger at the private-school subsidy system itself, suggesting it’s fueling an oversupply of correspondence high schools.
Hiring screenings for high school graduates, which began on the 16th, continue to reflect a seller’s market with a job-offer ratio of 3.6-to-1. Correspondence high schools, meanwhile, see one in four students graduate with no set career path. Even as enrollment surges — driven largely by students with a history of school refusal — many of these schools still lack the know-how to provide adequate career guidance.
In mid-September, at the Tokyo campus of Shiseikan Koto Gakuin (in Meguro, Tokyo), a staff member from Jinjibu — a company specializing in job-hunting support for high schoolers — gave a lecture on interview preparation.
The school operates as a “sa[tellite campus]…” affiliated with the correspondence-based Kashima Gakuen High School (Kashima City, Ibaraki Prefecture)…
Source: nikkei.com / Original article here
What people said
Right, probably just there for the equivalency exam (daiken, a GED-style diploma).
You'd hope they'd at least finish a vocational school on top of it.
A mail-order company, maybe?
Re: #14
Ugh, a third-tier private university ('wataku' — slang for a no-name private school) though…
Why would you say something that harsh?
Yeah, unless you're at a commercial or technical high school that actually gets job listings sent to it, guidance is probably half-assed everywhere.
Besides, if you're in high school, you should be figuring it out yourself anyway.
and the ones who actually profit are retired bureaucrats landing cushy post-retirement jobs and loan companies.
As she got older her symptoms improved and getting good grades turned out to be a breeze — she got to pick basically any university she wanted through the designated-school recommendation system lol.
Felt almost like cheating, it was that easy. She could pick whatever school was on the list lol.
She actually could've gone somewhere fairly well-known, but she said she didn't want to spend that much time commuting,
so she ended up at a decent-enough school near home instead lol.
By 'well-known university' you mean something like Higashi-Osaka U, right? [a jab implying it just sounds like a mashup of Tokyo University/'Todai' and Osaka University/'Handai']
Prefectural correspondence high schools got phased out and converted into credit-based schools, and yet private 'wide-area' correspondence high schools have exploded in number.
Both correspondence high schools and correspondence universities get more private-school subsidy funding for every student enrolled, so you end up with a flood of excessive advertising.
The online astroturfing is pretty intense too.
Well, it's the internet — you're allowed to say what you actually think here, no?
Honestly, telling people the hard truth is the kinder move.
That's mostly true, but surprisingly, plenty of people with a history of school refusal go on to do just fine as working adults.
And conversely, plenty of people who had zero trouble attending school fall apart once they actually start working.
Correspondence universities are even worse, honestly — they can't handle in-person interaction at all.
Isn't a correspondence university just something retirees do for fun after they retire?
Back in the day, high-school-educated civil servants trying to climb the ladder used to use them.
Now that there basically aren't any high-school-only civil servants left, they market it as 'lifelong learning' (scare quotes intended) to reel in people with a degree-envy complex.
Wonder what'll happen to the Open University of Japan — the grand hall of parachute jobs for the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and NHK retirees.
To get a nursing license.
To get a teaching license.
So a current Keio University student can slap an extra credential on their name.
Because they just want the status of 'being a university student.'
then transfer into another university's third year.
The thing is — would someone proactive enough to pull that off even end up in correspondence school to begin with?
If you can get into night school, honestly, better to go without working at all.
Isn't that night school (teiji-sei), not correspondence?
Mostly it's kids with a history of school refusal, or people juggling some other vocational school on the side.
If they can just manage to scrape by as a freelance part-timer (whether that's actually enough to live on, who knows), that should count as a win at this point.
If they had enough social functioning to attend school at all, there's bound to be some under-enrolled high school nearby that would still take them these days.
Most idols go correspondence these days too.
Same with high school baseball —
national sports-meet and Olympic development-squad athletes
spend class hours training and don't have time to study.
Back in the bubble era, I did the cram-school-by-day, high-school-at-night cycle,
dropped out in year three, got my equivalency (daiken), and went straight to a national university.
These days I'm on about 5 million yen a year, which is actually less than what part-time work paid back in the bubble.
Wouldn't it have been more efficient to just get the equivalency through cram school alone?
Was night school more like a backup plan?
You bottom-feeders couldn't beat him even standing on your heads.
So what university did he go to then?
Don't make stuff up — that was the sports program at Tohoku High School, a private school.
Same school where Yu Darvish reportedly used to lay out a futon in the back of the classroom and sleep during class.
Around that time, shogi's Sota Fujii probably got flooded with enrollment offers from correspondence high schools angling for a publicity boost.
Smart, and he turned them down without hesitation — pretty cool.
don't tell me it's correspondence university too.
Probably, yeah…
Background and Key Points of This Topic
Correspondence high schools have grown rapidly in recent years as a safety net for students with a history of school refusal (futōkō). Because private schools receive subsidy funding tied to enrollment numbers, there’s a built-in incentive to advertise aggressively to pull in students, and commenters on the thread pointed to exactly that structural incentive. At the same time, the “3.6-to-1 job-offer ratio” cited as evidence of a seller’s market applies to high school graduates as a whole, not specifically to correspondence-school graduates — and neither the original article nor the thread clearly separates the two, so it’s unclear whether correspondence-school graduates are actually sharing in that same favorable market. Commenters also brought up cases like figure skater Ami Nakai, shogi player Sota Fujii, and figure skater Yuzuru Hanyu, who chose correspondence schools to balance their sport or discipline with academics — but these are exceptional students who already had a clear path forward, a very different situation from the 26% who graduate with no set plans at all. Keeping that distinction between the exception and the average in mind is a useful frame for reading the article as a whole.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Breaking News+) thread “Correspondence High Schools’ Thin Career Support — Enrollment Surging, Yet 26% of Graduates Have No Set Path.”
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