According to a Nikkei series, Japan’s shrinking birthrate is expected to cut the number of university applicants by 30% by 2050, down to roughly 420,000 people. If enrollment quotas stay where they are now, that works out to 1 in 2 students being able to get into a national/public university or an elite private university. The estimate sparked debate on 5ch’s News Speed+ board: some worried about falling academic standards (“even idiots will get into top schools now”), while others pushed back, arguing “the bar at elite schools itself won’t change” and “universities will just scoop up top students from Japan and abroad.” Many posts agreed that the hensachi (standardized deviation score used to rank Japanese students) is losing meaning as a yardstick, with opinions diverging mainly on how to judge what comes after it.
Portrait of a Nation of 100 Million
By 2050, universities may no longer be chosen by hensachi score. The number of university applicants is projected to fall 30% to 420,000. Under current enrollment quotas, that would mean 1 in 2 students gets into a private or national/public university considered “elite.” Japan has long been called a credentialist society — will a new yardstick for evaluating universities emerge?
“The race to lock down top students will only accelerate. We’ve already entered an era where you can’t coast on brand name alone,” says a worried executive at a major private university in the Kansai region. Competition is already intensifying on the ground…(continued in the paid edition)
Source: nikkei.com / Original article here
These days any idiot can go to college.
Make it easy to get in but hard to graduate.
Charge held-back students through the nose in tuition.
That would actually raise the whole country's academic level.
Sure, a genuine bottom-tier "F-rank" school (slang for the lowest, virtually open-admission tier of universities) will take anyone and they're full of idiots, but people who get into prestigious universities are still just as sharp as ever.
There's still an academic-pedigree filter at hiring, and an F-rank degree gets treated about the same as a high school diploma, so the distinction still holds.
This country really is finished ☺
Not you though lol
conveniently forgetting how fierce competition was back when the population was growing.
Showa 63 is 1988.
Those guys will mostly be old geezers by 2050.
F-rank schools will probably be shutting down within a few years.
F-rank schools are already closing here and there, but wiping them all out won't happen in just a few years.
That'll take more like a decade or several decades.
Company W would rather hire foreigners than dim-witted Japanese grads.
That's because for a long time the dominant mindset was 'it's the company's job to train talent' under lifetime employment.
So when the economy was good, even high school grads could live pretty comfortably.
People call it a credentialist society, but for a long time your educational background didn't actually matter that much.
It was really a non-credentialist society — there wasn't much difference in life outcomes between the highly educated and everyone else.
People like that make up the majority of voters, which is exactly why this country is finished.
It's a flaw of universal suffrage.
Japan wasn't really a credentialist society.
Back then the population was growing and the economy was still developing, so there was a mountain of domestic-demand jobs — work anyone could do.
Now the population is shrinking, growth has stalled, and domestic jobs that anyone can do have shrunk hugely compared to before.
We've entered an era where you can't get by unless you do work developing-country workers can't do, or work that earns money overseas.
Becoming a credentialist society is inevitable, I think.
As quotas get cut across the board and schools close down,
I bet the elite schools stick around without their difficulty changing much.
Wasn't the plan to cut the number of universities in half by 2040?
Universities are a business, so apparently they'll just keep filling seats however they can lol
Online classes would be fine.
It's one of the screening criteria for hiring, after all.
Though apparently it's different when the HR person is a woman.
It's true the world doesn't go 'wow, Tokyo University!' the way it used to.
It was brutal back then.
Even with the same hensachi of 50, I feel like you used to be around the top 20% of your generation.
Now it's probably more like the top 40%.
Fall below that and 20 years from now you might end up hearing 'Wait, senpai, you went to an F-rank school? lol'
It'll be a university that doesn't even turn up when you search for it.
Schools that low probably won't even exist by then
— the term 'F-rank' might go extinct too.
Re: #107
Seriously, the academic ability of the junior new hires coming in lately has cratered.
If graduation were made as tough as in the US,
universities would have to change just to survive.
Think about the population numbers first.
Re: #141
There's actually plenty to learn lol
that's a separate issue.
Not sure how it is now, but apparently in France, like in the shogi world,
if you fail once the path to university closes for good.
In Germany, similar to Japanese high schools, if your academic level isn't up to par
you get steered early into industrial work, onto the Meister (skilled-trade) track.
The catch is, those top students won't necessarily be Japanese.
In fact, the former imperial universities and top private schools already have more English-only courses,
and the new faculty being launched at Tokyo University will hold more than half its classes in English.
Someone brought up Korean before, saying language matters for how you think.
English is very black-and-white,
but for ambiguous, nuanced thinking, isn't Japanese actually better suited?
It's not about whether Japanese is 'superior' or not —
it's about gathering top students and researchers from around the world, not just Japan.
I mean, top universities worldwide are research institutions, so this is just normal practice for them.
If that's the goal, you can't run lectures and research only in Japanese.
You're writing your papers in English anyway, so you might as well just use English day-to-day.
Background and key points of this discussion
The article draws on Nikkei’s series “Portrait of a Nation of 100 Million,” which starts from the estimate that, due to the declining birthrate, the number of university applicants in 2050 will fall 30% from today to roughly 420,000. Unless universities significantly cut their enrollment quotas, simple arithmetic says 1 in 2 students could get into a national/public university or an “elite” private university — raising the question of whether the university selection function itself is breaking down.
The thread split mainly over two points. One was whether to view “easier admission = falling academic ability” or “the level of elite universities will hold steady thanks to quota adjustments,” with many posts debating how fast F-rank universities will be weeded out and how the relative meaning of hensachi scores is shifting (even a hensachi of 50 now represents a different percentile within one’s generation than it used to). The other point concerned universities’ survival strategies — stricter graduation requirements (Western-style) and internationalization through more international students and English-language lectures — with some arguing this isn’t so much “getting harder” as “the pool being selected from expanding from domestic to global.” Worth noting: most of the original article sits behind Nikkei’s paywall, so specific numbers on planned quota cuts can’t be confirmed from the thread’s quotes alone.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (News Speed+) thread “Goodbye, Hensachi: By 2050, 1 in 2 Students Will Get Into a National or Elite Private University.”
