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The story
On November 7, entrepreneur Hiroyuki Nishimura posted on his X account that “universities have become job-prep schools, but there’s a high chance classroom lectures will be replaced by AI,” sparking discussion on 5ch’s Geinou/Sports Breaking News+ board. While there was broad agreement with the general direction that “universities should change in the long run,” opinions in the thread diverged sharply on the crucial question of exactly what should change and how. Proposals poured in one after another — hiding university names during hiring screenings, making math mandatory for humanities majors, splitting universities into research institutions versus vocational schools — and many pointed out that the real problem lies with companies’ hiring attitudes.
Sat, Nov 7, 7:22 PM
Entrepreneur Hiroyuki Nishimura (49) updated his X (formerly Twitter) account by November 7, commenting on the problems with Japanese universities.
Hiroyuki posted: “Universities have become job-prep schools, but there’s a high chance classroom lectures will be replaced by AI.”
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Think about it.
Because it's incredibly backward-looking.
Japanese people should study abroad more
Good idea
They should try it and hide all school names entirely
There are companies that already do that, but apparently hiding the name just ends up skewing hiring even more toward top universities, leaving F-rank grads with zero chance
Well, things will change one way or another eventually
Going to some worthless university is just a total waste of time
That's actually already how it is in America and places like that
Also require at least 2 years of work experience to enroll, with tuition paid by the employer
but the companies?
That's not an opinion at all
He just can't figure it out himself, so he's dumping the question on everyone else
If they can't manage that, turn them into vocational schools
But ask 'so who's actually going to do it' and nobody says a word
It's harder than scrapping construction of the battleship Yamato
Quite the logical leap
"Hiroyuki's just nitpicking as usual — there are plenty of people who already say it should change long-term, the real question is how"
Waseda, Keio, whoever — if they want to keep operating, make them relocate out to the middle of nowhere
That way only people who genuinely want to learn will stick around, and the vacated land in Tokyo can be put to better use
>Universities have become job-prep schools
That's been true for over 40 years… maybe longer
When job hunting, companies don't know a student's middle school or high school unless the student volunteers it, right?
So why can't the same apply to university names?
If companies were banned — with penalties — from digging into it during hiring, it'd become the norm within 10 years
You always have to write your high school on your resume and hand it to the company
Sometimes you even have to list your middle school
Have you never actually written a resume for job hunting?
People love to mock humanities students, but it's not humanities itself that's the problem — it's specifically Japan's humanities programs
Overseas, humanities students are mostly required to take at least some minimum math and statistics
Statistics? Commerce and economics are humanities subjects too, you know
Memorization is necessary
Memorize like crazy
Then pick and choose what actually becomes yours from that
Whatever you don't need, you'll forget anyway
If you never input anything, you end up unable to output anything
You turn into someone who can't hold a creative conversation and can only nitpick, like a certain someone
A person with no substance
A person who can't tell whether an AI's mistake is actually a mistake
If someone like that is going to use AI
then what's really needed in that situation isn't the person — it's the AI
Why does going to university even come with being told 'learn exactly this much of this'?
which university, what you studied there
Otherwise it's like someone saying 'I have a driver's license' without specifying whether it's for heavy machinery or an automatic-only car — hiring blind like that would cause real problems on the job
(1) Take over the family business
(2) Start your own business
(3) Get hired by someone
Very few people can give professional guidance on options 1 and 2
Real studying means deciding for yourself what to look into, researching it yourself, and acquiring new knowledge on your own — basically synonymous with research
Just memorizing things that are already known, things someone else already figured out, is merely learning
If you're not constantly being told to turn in a 20-page report by next week like in the West, you can't really call it a university
Also, something needs to be done about this twisted sense of equality
Putting equality first while treating actual growth as an afterthought
makes no sense
Let kids skip grades
push the capable ones further ahead, pile on more load
that's what 'growth first' actually looks like
To put it in terms you'd get:
it's like sticking Vegeta and Chiaotzu in the same gravity room set to some half-baked middling level (a Dragon Ball reference to mismatched training)
For Vegeta the gravity's way too weak to do anything
for Chiaotzu it's way too strong to do anything
Either way it's pointless
And when you ask 'why is it like that,'
apparently it's because it'd be unfair to kids who couldn't attend school due to a rough home environment
Going back to school as an adult with money you earned yourself would be a perfectly fine option, but that gets shut down by this vague notion that 'failing at school ruins your whole life'
If a parent is abusive or neglectful, child services should just step in and separate the kid — but no, apparently it doesn't work that way
they can't act unless the child themselves says they don't want to stay
so that gets shut down too
As long as things run on mystery rules and fuzzy sentimentality like this, there's no escaping what Yutabon-kun calls being a "useless robot" (Yutabon is a young Japanese YouTuber famous for dropping out of school and criticizing the education system)
For science majors working factory jobs, what they actually do is no different from a technical high school grad
The knowledge needed on the job is more than covered by a technical high school education
Is advanced math really not useful?
Saying history is useless
sounds very Japanese
but the Chinese, who've gone through plenty of hardship, write everything down
right down to proper character assessments of notable historical figures
they don't actually teach anything useful for after you start working.
Things have just gotten messed up because basically everyone gets admitted now.
They should scrap the 'anyone can get in' system, cut the number of universities in half,
and have the other half of students go to vocational schools instead
Japanese people really do love education
Yet ironically, not understanding its true nature
is also very Japanese
In the end, there are things you can only learn by getting out into the field
but all they give you is a simulated experience of 'preview, review, take notes — now you've learned it!'
As far as I know, this exact argument has been going on since Kukai and Saicho (two rival Buddhist monks from the early Heian period)
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
Hiroyuki has repeatedly criticized university education in the past, and the thread also brought up his old unpaid-damages controversy (comment 17), reflecting an underlying distrust of the man himself. The claim that “universities have become job-prep schools” isn’t new, either — as comment 25 points out, it’s an old argument that’s been made for over 40 years — but this time it comes with a fresh angle added by the spread of generative AI: the idea that “classroom lectures will be replaced by AI.” What split the thread was the question of who should actually be responsible for making the change, with several comments (comment 14) arguing that the real problem lies with companies’ hiring attitudes rather than universities’ own systems. The idea of hiding university names during hiring has actually been tried by some companies, but it reportedly backfired, skewing hiring even further toward graduates of top-tier universities (comment 24) — a real-world example hinting at how hard this is to fix with idealism alone.”
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Geinou/Sports Breaking News+) thread “Hiroyuki shares his take on universities becoming “job-prep schools”: “Plenty of people say it should change in the long run… but how should it change?”“.
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