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The story
Japan’s 2025 “National Student Survey” by the Ministry of Education found that 60% of university sophomores spend five hours or less per week on study time such as preparation and review for classes. University establishment standards assume about two hours of outside-class study per class session, but the reality falls far short. The survey covered 734 schools nationwide and received responses from roughly 320,000 students. On 5ch, the results sparked debate over whether the cause lies in the quality of teaching or in students’ attitudes, with many also pointing to the spread of generative AI as a factor cutting into study time, as well as the fact that job hunting in Japan tends to prioritize university prestige and extracurricular “gakuchika” stories over academic grades.
Japan’s Ministry of Education’s 2025 “National Student Survey” found that 60% of university sophomores spend five hours or less per week on study time such as class preparation, review, and assignments.
The government’s university establishment standards assume about two hours of outside-class study for every class session (roughly one hour long), but the survey revealed a stark gap between that assumption and students’ actual lives.
The survey aims to clarify the real state of student life and university education in order to drive improvements. More than 90% of Japan’s national, public, and private universities — 734 schools in total — participated, and online responses were collected from about 320,000 students, representing 25% of second-year undergraduates and final-year students (fourth- or sixth-years).
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Teaching, you know — unless you're an adjunct, professors honestly don't have much incentive to put effort into it.
Writing papers, doing research, landing research grants — that's what actually helps your career.
Not saying it's okay to slack off, but it's kind of like how in a private company you naturally focus on whatever gets you evaluated — same structure.
University classes are, at best, just there to point you in a direction — you can only actually absorb the material by studying on your own.
There's no way to understand something just by sitting there listening.
If people are using AI to do their assignments, that's beyond 'academic collapse' — it's a whole different level.
Being able to use AI to get assignments done is actually the more useful skill, though.
Because that's exactly what you'll do once you're out in the working world.
Reports and papers? Use AI and it's done in 10 seconds.
South Korea's even opening high schools focused on semiconductors.
At this rate Japan's just going to keep falling further behind Korea.
Meanwhile Japan still seems to have a ton of vocational schools for anime and voice acting.
Companies just accepted whichever students got allocated to them from the 'right' universities and then molded them in-house to their liking.
Back then, companies took it for granted that all you really learned in college was how to have fun — that was the implicit deal.
It wasn't until the hiring ice age that students who actually studied seriously started entering the workforce.
Isn't that still basically how it works today?
That's exactly why people pour their energy into 'gakuchika' (résumé-worthy extracurricular stories) instead of academics…
It all comes down to the university's name.
Even back in the bubble era, people were shocked when a grad from a 'Daito-Teikoku' tier school (a group of lower-ranked private universities) landed an office job at a top-tier company.
Cram school instructors aren't teachers either.
The whole thing is fundamentally wrong.
Companies don't hire people who actually love studying.
The reason being, the people in charge of hiring were never the ones who loved studying in the first place.
Maybe the workplace itself doesn't particularly want people who are good at studying either.
That's exactly why corporate performance isn't growing — but hey, as long as the banks keep lending money, it somehow works out lol
It's more useful for the smart ones to go into research or specialist tracks anyway.
Especially since Japanese companies barely have enough competent managers who know how to handle people with master's or PhD degrees.
That's a uniquely Japanese problem, honestly.
Except Japanese 'colleges' are vocational schools — ranked below universities.
Just getting rid of the 'must graduate within X years' limit would probably improve things quite a bit.
Otherwise kids never get to learn anything actually useful.
Like what, specifically?
Saying stuff like that
is exactly what's made people dumber and killed individuality —
that's where we are now, lol
The real problem is private schools cutting the number of entrance exam subjects just to inflate their average exam scores.
Wrong.
The reason companies can't fire people is a national law — employment protection regulations.
Companies want to fire incompetent full-time employees and hire capable ones instead.
And if that were possible, full-time employees would also work desperately hard to avoid being fired.
But what's blocking that is the national law on dismissal protections.
Neither management nor workers are the ones at fault here.
Japan is gradually moving toward labor market liberalization, though.
And as that's happened, Japan's competitiveness has been declining.
You need to look at reality.
It's nowhere close to liberalized.
That's exactly why Japan's competitiveness is falling.
Look at reality —
Japan has one of the lowest levels of labor mobility in the world, and it's declining faster than anywhere else.
I'm telling you to look at the trend.
Japan's labor market mobility is higher now than it used to be.
And yet Japan's competitiveness used to be higher in the past.
Labor liberalization and corporate competitiveness are two different things.
Take Toyota, for example — most people who join Toyota stay for a long time.
So does that mean Toyota's workforce is somehow inadequate as labor? No — it generates massive profits.
The jobs that actually need more mobility are things like well-paid management positions,
and those have already become more fluid.
What Japan is lacking right now is capital investment.
And for companies to invest in capital, profit margins need to rise.
For that, you need mild inflation — without it, there's no economic turnaround.
No executive invests in capital under a deflationary mindset.
And yet the media panics the moment mild inflation shows up.
If core-core CPI growth hit something like 4%, sure, a bit of monetary tightening would make sense —
but they panic over just 1%.
At that rate, neither economic growth nor productivity will ever improve.
Back in the day, wrongful dismissals, unpaid overtime ('service overtime'), workplace harassment, and brutal hours were all just normal.
That's exactly why everyone worked themselves to the bone.
And that's why companies could make great products, sell them, turn a profit, and grow.
But now that labor laws are actually being enforced and those things are gone,
nobody works themselves to the bone anymore.
As for labor market mobility, that's what the dispatch worker law was created for.
The dispatch law exists specifically to protect the jobs of full-time employees at big companies.
It's meaningless if only the bottom-rung temp workers have mobility.
Japanese companies can't win unless there's mobility at the top too — the people actually doing development at big firms.
The dispatch law, if anything, blocks exactly that.
It's not exactly harassment, but there are definitely places with intense pressure.
Nidec's a famous example — Mr. Nagamori.
But it's not as simple as 'pressure employees and performance goes up.'
It's well known that teams with high psychological safety actually perform better.
Every company used to be like that back in the day.
There was even a TV commercial for it — 'Can you work 24 hours? Busine-e-ess-maaan~' (a famous 1980s energy-drink ad slogan).
It's not like every company was piling on pressure to make people work 24 hours straight.
It's more accurate to say there was an unspoken contract: the company won't fire you and will take care of you, and in exchange the employee gives everything to the company.
Japanese employee: 'Got the job offer. I'm set for life now — the company will take care of me until retirement.'
Foreign employee: 'Got the offer, but the real fight starts now. I'll work like hell to survive.'
Japanese company: 'Let's train our engine engineers in motor tech from scratch and start EV development in five years.'
Foreign company: 'Let's lay off the engine engineers, hire motor engineers, and start EV development tomorrow.'
You really think Japan wins with that approach?
that's the studying you actually want to do. School coursework is really just foreign language classes;
STEM majors obviously study their major, but that's about it.
That's pretty much how it is now —
people study what they actually want to and make the most of it.
Makes you realize blue-collar life after just a high school diploma really is hell by comparison.
Eventually AI that manages other AI will become the norm too, and all that'll be left for humans is blue-collar work.
It'd be fine if AI gave you 100% accurate answers no matter what you asked it to do.
But in reality it's nowhere close to that, which is exactly why human value that can outdo AI is rising right now.
Anyone who blindly believes whatever answer AI spits out is basically an 'AI cultist' — and without exception, an idiot.
When it comes to specialized topics, AI lies a fair amount (the so-called 'hallucination' problem).
Catching those lies takes real knowledge and experience.
In fact, in the US right now,
people with the knowledge and experience to spot AI hallucinations
are becoming highly valued.
How did it get this way?
Is it the influence of some weird TV dramas or manga?
It's because they made way too many universities.
Probably because novelists and media people are overwhelmingly humanities majors.
I mean, sure, even if you skip class, you're busy with theater or writing…
but the college life those people depict ends up shaping everyone's image of it,
and the end result of that, hitting right as the hiring ice age struck, is basically 2ch.
The library's books are 100% always checked out, so you end up having to buy them.
,
I wonder if AI makes that easier now.
'Easier' doesn't even begin to describe it — it spits out a polished, copy-paste-ready essay complete with sources.
I was a student a bit over 10 years ago, and back then the internet and digging through papers for loopholes covered that just fine.
Background and Key Points
The Ministry of Education’s “National Student Survey” is a nationwide survey that began in fiscal 2019. University establishment standards assume about two hours of outside-class study for every one class session. By simple math, 15 class sessions a week would call for 30 hours of self-study — yet in reality, 60% of students study five hours or less, a massive gap. On the thread, opinions split between blaming declining student motivation and blaming the incentive structure for faculty (research and papers count toward career advancement, while teaching doesn’t). The spread of generative AI, which lets students churn out reports in a fraction of the time, was also raised as a factor accelerating the drop in study time. Posters also pointed to the reality that Japanese job hunting values university prestige and “gakuchika” (stand-out extracurricular achievements) over academic performance — a systemic contradiction in “why study at all” that isn’t obvious from the original article, but is worth keeping in mind.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Breaking News+) thread “60% of university sophomores study “5 hours or less a week” for class prep and review — little self-study outside class.”
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