From our other sites
The story
An article that went viral on 5ch’s Breaking News+ board revealed that the median household income for families with children attending private middle schools exceeds ¥11 million a year, with only 13% of such households earning ¥6 million or less. The piece also noted that 44% of University of Tokyo students graduated from private combined junior-senior high schools, once again highlighting just how much a family’s financial power shapes educational outcomes. The thread saw a clash between those who argued “public school is fine” or “if you’re smart enough, you can get in without cram school,” and others who bluntly framed private middle school exams as “buying your child’s future with money.” Vivid firsthand accounts from graduates of Japan’s elite “Big Three” prep schools and the University of Tokyo flew back and forth.
<The median annual household income for families sending their children to private middle schools is over ¥11 million, and only 13% of such households earn ¥6 million or less>
The widening income gap between households is now casting a shadow over children’s education. (photoAC)
Looking at the high schools University of Tokyo students graduated from, 44% attended private combined junior-senior high schools (from the 2023 University of Tokyo Student Life Survey). Since private school students make up only about 8% of all middle schoolers nationwide, it’s safe to estimate that students at private combined junior-senior high schools account for a somewhat smaller share — roughly 5%.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Both sons of a family in the next village over went from the local public middle school to a public high school, and both ended up at the University of Tokyo.
One rose through the ranks to become chairman of a major company, and the other is apparently a Nobel Prize contender.
If a kid's got what it takes, a nearby public high school is plenty.
These days that kind of path makes people worry about the future.
Public schools these days are so rough that there's a risk your kid ends up committing a crime.
Wealthy families like it because if you finish the exam before the rebellious teenage phase hits, you can coast with some peace of mind all the way to university entrance exams.
Even with a low household income, public combined junior-senior high schools are a good option since they don't cost tuition.
It's necessary.
At the end of the day, people only grow through competition.
Private schools are better because the competition is handpicked.
Though apparently some rare geniuses grow just fine without any competition at all.
Tons of MARCH students come straight from rural public schools, but if you're below average among private middle-school exam takers, you can't even make it into MARCH.
The handful of genuinely sharp kids get funneled into the "Big Three" elite schools, and everyone else is just fertilizer.
That's the private exam-prep industry for you.
Plenty of kids who go through private middle school exams end up at Todai, Waseda, or Keio (the "Teisōkei" tier — imperial universities plus Waseda/Keio) though.
Public schools were way rougher 30 years ago.
These days, a lot of public school kids are just apathetic.
When it comes to university, it doesn't make much difference whether you went private or public.
I think there was data showing the average Sapix (a top cram school) student's future track ends up at "Nikko-Koma" tier schools (lower-ranked private universities) anyway.
Depends on the municipality.
Some areas are "public school kingdoms,"
where private school has a strong image of being "where rich idiots go."
Back in the day, people lived together with their parents' and grandparents' generations,
sharing the fixed costs of childcare, housework, and running a household, which is exactly why so many young people could marry and have kids with peace of mind.
The spread of individualism has split the parent/grandparent generation off from the younger generation, dumping all the responsibility and burden of child-rearing onto the younger generation alone,
turning marriage and child-rearing into expensive luxuries.
What Japan actually needs to fix its declining birthrate is to abandon individualism.
There's data showing the unmarried rate started climbing noticeably right around the time arranged marriages and workplace marriages declined.
Pretty much every country where free-choice dating became the norm ends up with a falling birthrate.
Because once that becomes the mainstream, a certain chunk of the population simply can't find a spouse.
¥6 million a year, huh.
With marriages happening later these days, most parents are in their 40s now.
Though in rural areas you still get a lot of younger parents.
A household income of ¥6 million split between two earners would mean ¥3 million each, which just isn't realistic.
That's not a household that should be having kids, honestly.
My family made over ¥30 million and we were still lower-middle in my class.
Even in the Showa era, a household income in the hundreds of millions of yen was completely normal in that world.
At my school, I don't think a single household made only ¥6 million.
¥6 million in the Showa era was a pretty high income though.
Wouldn't that be enough to go private?
I'm a graduate of one of the "Big Three" elite schools, and literally everyone's parents were politicians, bureaucrats, executives, or doctors.
No idea what the bottom-tier private schools are like though.
Azabu, maybe?
Now that you mention it, the Azabu crowd did seem kind of out of touch with reality — but isn't your final degree what actually matters?
My final degree is from Hitotsubashi, but I never really crossed paths with kids from combined junior-senior high schools or rural public schools, so I couldn't tell you.
Even the clubs and seminars I was in only let in graduates of prestigious schools.
Even in college, I never heard of anyone around me whose household income was under ¥10 million.
I went to the University of Tokyo, but the people I actually hung out with were all regular folks.
Maybe people just naturally flock together with others like themselves no matter where they end up.
People who actually bring up their household income like that are maybe one in ten million.
a battle where mediocre kids from Tokyo and Osaka try to out-cram raw provincial talent — the kind that comes roaring back during the three years of high school — by cheating with double the study hours.
Exactly.
Private middle school exams are how mediocre kids use money to boost their future prospects.
Every family doing the exam prep thing knows this.
Though these days, since so few kids are even being born in rural areas anymore, apparently almost everyone at Todai comes from the greater Tokyo area now.
That's an intense battle lol
The scary part is that even if you win,
the expected payoff in life you actually get
really doesn't add up to the effort.
Don't fall for the education industry's scheme to make "private middle school is the norm" common sense.
40% of Japanese people get by in life without even finishing college, let alone attending private middle school.
The real question is what kind of life that 40% is actually living.
There are prefectures where the public middle schools are so bad that people avoid them entirely.
Since it's a pure test of natural intelligence, if you're smart enough you can get in without heavy-duty prep.
You basically can't pass those without cram-school prep specifically for public combined junior-senior high exams.
To begin with, almost nobody applies to public combined schools as their only choice.
The competition ratio is just too high.
If you're smart enough, you'll pass.
The essay section needs technique so that requires some prep, but everything else is basically pure brainpower.
You're just falling for the cram schools' marketing that says you can't pass without them.
Put the other way, if your natural intelligence isn't quite there, no amount of effort will get you into a public combined junior-senior high school.
It's clearly the private middle school exam route where effort actually pays off.
Nobel Prize winners are almost all public-school graduates.
The only exception is maybe Mr. Noyori.
I think there's some kind of causal link there.
Kids from wealthy families don't go into basic research — it's unglamorous work that doesn't pay.
And to begin with, both Mr. Kyōgō and Mr. Yamanaka went to public high schools anyway.
The venue for the national exam was at one of those elite prep high schools, and the facilities were practically business-hotel level.
I remember thinking, if I went to a place like this, my soul would rot.
Background and Key Points of This Debate
Nationally, only about 8% of middle schoolers attend private schools, yet the fact that 44% of University of Tokyo students come from private combined junior-senior high schools shows just how much household income shapes access to higher education. The original article’s figures — a median income over ¥11 million for private middle school households, with only 13% earning ¥6 million or less — are worth reading carefully: since ¥6 million a year is close to the national average rather than a poverty-level income, this isn’t fundamentally a story about absolute poverty. It’s a story about a relative gap that has opened up between those who can afford to compete in the exam race and those who can’t. In the thread, optimistic takes like “public school is enough” and “a smart enough kid can get into a public combined school without cram school” sat alongside more cynical ones like “private middle school exams are just mediocre people buying future potential with money” — notably, neither camp actually denied the value of the exam system itself. At the same time, comments that dismissed public schools as unsafe or academically weak were often just impressions without concrete evidence, and should be read with that caveat.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Breaking News+) thread “Even a ¥6 Million Household Income Makes Private Middle School Exams Tough for Kids… The Reality That ‘Marriage and Childbirth Are Luxuries,’ as Revealed by the Income Distribution of Households with School-Age Children“.
Leave a Reply