Abstract
The purpose of this study is to depict how the public goods of internationalizing higher education in Japan, especially inbound international students, are viewed by various stakeholders based on the main findings from semi-structured interviews. The interviewees include key persons from different levels or fields in Japan: officials from MEXT (the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology), national agencies in relation to international students and international cooperation, a national-level professional association of higher education research, both top-level and middle-level leaders of one research-intensive national university, academics from Humanities, Engineering, and Economics, administrators in charge of internationalization of their respective universities, and international students from diverse backgrounds. The study begins with a brief introduction to the research background, before presenting the analysis and main findings from the interviews. It concludes by arguing how the public good and its relationship to the internationalization of Japanese higher education are viewed and interpreted by different stakeholders, and offering brief implications for research and practice.
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Notes
Influenced by the US model, the Japanese government implemented a series of policies for building a democratic society after WWII. The main points of these policies include the establishment of national and local public universities in each prefecture and the expansion of higher education with a purpose of accepting more students from a wide range of backgrounds and social classes.
According to MEXT’s annual Basic School Survey in 2018, among the total number of 782 universities in Japan, 603 are private, 86 are national and 93 are local public. As for the student enrolment ratio, 73.7% are enrolled at private institutions.
Since the implementation of the Act, the government has provided financial support to private institutions consistently.
At its peak in 1980, government funding covered nearly 30% of operating expenditure of individual private higher education institutions, it shrank to approximately 10% since 1990s.
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Acknowledgments
This study is part of an international joint project on the Future of Higher Education which is led by Centre for Global Higher Education. The authors of this article want to express their thanks to the Economic and Social Research Council, UK, for allocating funding to support this research.
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Huang, F., Horiuchi, K. The public good and accepting inbound international students in Japan. High Educ 79, 459–475 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-019-00418-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-019-00418-z