Japan's Universities Are Failing

Also if you're looking at Asian univs, Tsinghua, Peking, SNU, NUS, KAIST and (CUHK/HKUST) should be there too ;)

- The rigor in most Japanese universities is in the entrance exam. It's quite tough and is a decent filter for intelligence and study skills. STEM degrees in Japan can sometimes be rigorous as well.

- I would humbly argue that most US degrees (not sure about Europe) are not terribly rigorous outside of STEM fields and STEM-wannabe fields like economics. I have two degrees from two Ivy schools and many professors as friends, so I think I have a decent feel for who has to study hard to graduate and who doesn't.

- The schools are definitely a hiring pipeline, with the main factor being gaining admission. There are two problems with this. First, the average quality of entering students has fallen rapidly in the past 25 or so years. As such, a degree from any school not called Tokyo University has decreased in value and prestige by quite a bit. While a big Japan megacorp may have been willing to hire 20 graduates from a second-tier national university in 1985 (because they were high value-add individuals), they may only see 5 graduates in 2017 from the same school with the same level of value add. Second, there are just fewer salaryman jobs available today. As such, schools that used to be a strong part of the hiring pipeline are now only mariginal parts of the pipeline. Many parents and students are very frustrated by this. Japanese megacorps have started leaning much more on low-prestige temporary workers to replace the missing warm bodies that they are not hiring (compared to the past). These temp jobs are terrible for Japanese society since they are relatively low wage jobs with low stability and low prestige -- it's almost like not having a job other than the fact that you have to be at work. As I have said in another reply, I hope the youth of Japan get sick of this and rebel -- the older generation is massively screwing the younger generation in a gaping societal generational divide.

1. There is a very high likelihood that you will "drop of the face of the earth" in terms of research if you go there for a long-term professor gig. You will most likely find that the quality of your everyday peers will be less-than-stimulating academically compared to your everyday peers in a top US program. Note that there will be exceptions, but they will be exceptions. Japan is fine if you think that you will be a third-rate or lower researcher in the US (i.e., no publications that will be highly cited either for broad topics (first tier) or niche topics (second tier) -- those are my terms that I find convenient for differentiating academics). If you just want a taste, one option is to go as a post-doc. Aim high in terms of school prestige if you do this, and try to get on a project in which you can do your own thing or that has a topic that you love. There are some schools (or affiliated research orgs) that do international-level STEM research and definitely want western researchers on their projects.

2. Funding varies, but unless you are Japanese or highly integrate yourself into Japanese society, you are very unlikely to get substantial funding directly from the government or industry. As such, the best way to get funding will be from a sponsoring professor in Japan (this is not uncommon) or piggyback on something from your US contacts. Some schools (e.g., Aizu) seem to have a good gig going in terms of funding for their foreign faculty, but I don't know who is pulling the strings (e.g., in terms of actually applying, etc.).

3. It varies by research group. In general, it works as a hierarchy based on experience on the team. Special treatment for exceptional students/researchers is rare unless they are a hired gun (usu. a temporary gig). Post docs might be a slightly different story. It really depends on the field and the school/professor, but I encourage you to set your expectations for respectful treatment to be very low.

4. Not so possible in Japan... sort of. Basically it is possible to bounce around the Type A schools in the "Top 30" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Global_University_Project) as a Japanese professor. There is a pecking order within those schools (usu. Todai, but sometimes others in specific fields), and grad students typically filter down (i.e., the best usually stay at their school on a space-available basis, and the others take a step down the prestige ladder within the Type A schools). It's tougher to move from a Type B school to a Type A school (but possible with stellar work and/or the right connections). I think it's almost impossible to move from a non Top 30 school to a Type A school regardless of who your advisor is. Note that moves as a professor will likely require strong personal contacts at the target school as well as strong bona fides. If you are coming from the US, a recommendation from a very well known international researcher will likely get you some sort of a job if you work the right channels. I can't tell if you're asking this as a potential grad student in Japan (don't do it if you want to come back to the US) or as a US grad student wanting to go to Japan, or something else.

5. Professors often have funding for conferences. My school had a "research budget" for each professor for such things. There was also a departmental general fund that could be tapped into for special cases (not routine conference attendance). Other schools handle it differently. Regardless, there is money there.

5a. Project failures. Hmmm... maybe "failure" wasn't the best way to phrase it. First, any research that has a legitimate chance of being published in a western journal can 100% be published in something in Japan. As such, it's not really a failure if you have a paper. Actual failures can come in two forms (that I have seen) in Japan. One form is just not getting results in a series of experiments in a given time frame and not having anything "meaningful" to publish. A second sort of failure is simply not publishing regularly -- for example, it is often considered poor form to work on something potentially substantive for several years and not publish a few small (and probably meaningless) things in the interim. The unwritten rules on this are pretty clear. Frankly, I think this is why some people "drop of the face of the earth" when they go to Japan -- they get wrapped up in these limited-scope papers and forget how to move towards more substantive research. The myopia is real.

Misc. I read a couple of your other comments about "target" schools and whatnot. Be careful thinking that things like "top 3 publication-wise" mean anything in Japan. Your school may be a big deal in Japan or at the specific school you apply to, but the reasons will often be due to less academically substantive reasons and possibly due to something random (e.g., someone in the department studied there). Also be careful about being too proud of what you've done in terms of research/publications -- the frames of reference are different.

Let me know if you have any other questions.

Could there be some advantage in having multiple populations with some positive and non-negligible but still not super high amount of mixing, over having a single population which, uh, mixes with itself "uniformly" ?

Like, what if random genetic variation over time in the different groups going in "different directions" but always mixing with the others a bit might allow for more diversity of things being "tried" than in the single group, and maybe this would result in "good ideas" being "tried"/"discovered" more often, and which could then spread to the other groups.

The "good ideas" would of course spread to the other groups more slowly than if it was all in one group, but maybe there could be some level of mixing where an improvement in the rate of "good ideas" being "found" was enough to outweigh the cost of "good ideas" taking longer to spread to different groups, so that all the groups benefit?

HOWEVER: note that I am not advocating making any decisions based on this argument. Even if such a level of mixing/not-mixing exists which would be better than having it all be one group, that doesn't mean that that level of mixing is less mixing than would happen if this argument were not considered, so this argument does not mean decreasing mixing would be good. If the level of (genetic) mixing has an impact at all (I don't know if it does), it seems equally possible that the optimal level is greater than the current level.

(Maybe if the level of mixing were "too low", then the mixing would become less effective? In the extreme (unrealistic) case, if the different groups became almost unable to mix, as a result of mixing too rarely, that might be very bad, because then "good ideas" couldn't spread from group to group?)

And even if some levels of mixing would result in better results (e.g. in health) over time than others, and even if a different level were better than the level that would be the result if no one tried to influence this level, that doesn't mean it would be good to try to influence the level towards that "better" level. Attempting to influence that level might be e.g. dehumanizing or un-virtuous, or bad for other reasons.

I want to make it very clear that I'm just talking about this as an intellectual exercise, and am not advocating any actions based on this argument. These lines of reasoning were ignoring the fact that the groups being considered are people, and really, the fact that these people are /people/ makes things relating to that much more important than any of the other considerations, and when they conflict, the fact that these are /people/ takes priority over any concerns about like, "gene flow" or whatever.

If you are concerned that the ideas in this comment might be repeated in harmful ways I am willing to delete this comment upon request, as long as this website lets me do that.

The education system, as the article points out, is underfunded not because they don't have the money, but because they're spending it on other things.

And one sure method to destroying your way of life is to let a bunch of people in who are there for the money and aren't particularly interested in your way of life. If you're a Japanese person in Japan and you don't want to live in another country, why would you want other countries to live with you?

Japan is a resource-poor country without much arable land. They could stand to have a smaller population. From what I can see the only real downside to a smaller population is military power, and in the age of nuclear weapons I'm not sure how much it matters, particularly for an island nation.

You can't ascribe the position of the US solely to its immigration policies. Especially since it's impossible to correlate immigration trends in recent years in the US to economic trends.

Trying to credit America's success on the "US Way" is fallacious - I don't think we'd be much worse off if we were ruled by a monarchy, or even an extremely ethnically homogenous culture, since we're protected by two oceans, have massive oil and mineral and forest reserves, and had the native population decimated by infectious diseases before we moved in.

However, drowning your citizens in a sea of immigrants is cultural suicide. If your culture is such that it has allowed your ancestors to build a country that immigrants want to flee their own countries to live in, then your culture is worth preserving, rather than allowing it to be replaced by the culture of those who would happily flood into it.

That means, you can't solve your demographic problems by opening the floodgates. Instead, you need to fix the economic problems that are making people hesitant to have children in the first place.

Very true. But it's also fundamentally different than if the American influence were to have come from 10 or 20 million actual Americans living in Japan.

"Have they not accepted American culture?"

America does not have a culture in the classical sense of the term, or to be more fair - it's a new kind of culture.

Ergo - there is a 'lot less to accept'.

In America, you can 'do as you please' so long as you're not out go hurt anyone.

In Japan, there are a myriad of rules, spoken and unspoken, that one must adhere to.

It's easy for immigrants to 'get along' in the New World.

It'd be exceedingly hard to do so in places with more established classical culture.

This can be seen in Europe: they are very much intellectually and political open to newcomers, and yet have a really, really hard time integrating them.

There are dangerous, 'no go' zones in Sweden.

There are zero 'no go' or dangerous places here in Canada (or at least not based on migrant residence), where we have a lot more immigrants than Sweden.

In Canada we don't have our own language, customs, no cuisine, few social expectations other than fairly secular ones: go to school, get a job, be good, pay your taxes.

My point is not to be knee-jerk about the nationality source, but rather look at the claims and evaluate them. If they previously ranked Tokyo University so highly -- should we throw that out too?

Test of us non-postmodernists value an education system capable of producing competent elites, who in turn produce value for society (measure that how you like). By that measure, it's pretty apparent that Japan's universities are doing poorly.

And the Japanese agree with this, in case you missed it. Please stop with this nauseating pedantry.

Many of the journals are essentially pay to play -- join an organization, present at the conference, write a paper for the proceedings that is not completely absurd (slight absurdity is ok), ship $100, and you will get published.

There are journals that are more rigorous, and getting into these at last once is often a key to better employment, but these are the exceptions rather than the rule. Furthermore, I would say that most of the work published in the competitive domestic Japan journals would not be publishable abroad both due to limited impact as well as (in some fields) questionable methodology.

As a simple example of the low quality that I found in some journals, many academics were unable to interpret standard t-tests correctly in their evaluation of their research. It brought a tear to my eye.