REMADE IN JAPAN

ASEE Prism, Sep 2004 by Craft, Lucille

JAPAN IS WORKING TO IMPROVE THE QUALITY OF ENGINEERING EDUCATION, WHICH HAS SLIPPED IN RECENT YEARS SO THAT GRADS ARE NO LONGER GUARANTEED JOBS.

TOKYO-Japan's ivory towers are being shaken to their foundations by plunging budgets, dwindling enrollments, and soul-searching about the value of what's taught in college classrooms. At the epicenter of this education earthquake rumbling through the world's second-largest economy are the nation's nearly 300 public and private engineering schools.

Once the pride of a country that rebuilt itself from the ashes of World War II using its technological prowess, Japanese engineering schools are now forced to justify their very existence. The problem, professors say, is that Japan's engineering colleges have never evolved from their post-World War II role as mass training bases for the soldiers of an emerging industrial economy.

"When Japan was in its development phase, it needed lots of engineers," says Hiroshi Fukusaki, executive director of the Japan Accreditation Board for Engineering Education, which is only five years old. "We don't need so many engineers anymore," he adds. "What we need now is quality, not quantity."

With Japanese engineering schools churning out a whopping 110,000 undergraduate degrees a year, Japan trains four times as many engineers as it did back in the 1960s, when the Japanese economy was clocking growth of over 10 percent a year. And despite having a population half that of the United States, Japan manages to produce one and a half times as many engineers.

In the past decade, however, GDP growth has barely risen above 1 percent annually, prompting calls on evening news shows and chat boards to shutter excess universities. With the birthrate sliding, colleges are chasing a shrinking pool of bodies to fill lecture seats. Almost one third of all Japanese private universities failed to fill their freshmen classes in fiscal 2003, according to Japan Times.

In the fierce battle to woo students, many schools have been forced to lower the bar to entry. There's no solid evidence a degree is worth less than it used to be, concedes Itsuo Ohnaka, formerly chairperson of the department of adaptive machine systems in the engineering department of the elite Osaka University, and now with Osaka Sangyo University. But he and other engineering professors are certain their suspicions are well founded. "The quality of university graduates is slipping," he insists.

The fault, professors maintain, lies only partly with them. Throughout the halls of academe there is universal distress about a new "disease" running rampant through the student body: terminal ennui. "Every professor complains students are running out of motivation," says Shuichi Fukuda, dean of engineering, school of intelligent systems, at the Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Technology. "The biggest difference between Japanese and U.S. students is [ours] lack ambition and vitality."

The country's 89 public universities have historically dominated the field of engineering and science, largely because the hefty cost of funding such programs has been beyond reach for all but a handful of private schools. And it is here, at public universities, where some of the most dramatic reforms are unfolding. On April 1, 2004, public universities were spun off from under the wing of the Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology Ministry and are now independent nonprofit institutions with private-sector-style management. Over the next few years, the nearly 123,000 professors and support staff of all public universities will cease being civil servants and become regular employees, subject to performance-based pay if the schools choose. The taxpayer-funded subsidy that covers two thirds of every public university's operating expenses is no longer assured. Schools must now submit six-year plans and pass regular evaluations in order to secure funds. Japan Times calls the streamlining movement "the most significant change to Japan's higher education system in more than a century."

Accreditation chief Fukusaki agrees. "Until now, all public universities were alike, with the same philosophy," he says. "Now they have to develop their own goals and objectives."

With total education outlays being slashed by 1 percent annually, some schools will see the measures as draconian. Fukuda reckons Japan needs a scant one third of the public institutions it runs now, or about 30. Fukucla isn't sweating, though. He is, in fact, breathing a sigh of relief. The privatization of higher education promises to take professors off the leash of bureaucratic control and niggling "silly rules" that, in the best traditions of authoritarian states, control minute aspects of their existence, from the square meters allotted to their research lab, to where and when they can travel abroad, to the number of pencils they are permitted to order. Now, instead of wasting time filing applications in triplicate for every paper clip, scholars are allowed to apply for Rinding in lump sums.