Japan's universities fighting to attract students

DAZAIFU, Japan: When Yasunori Iwanaga was choosing universities three years ago, it was not the quality of academics, the strong team in his favorite sport of judo or even the study abroad program in England that swayed him to choose Fukuoka University of Economics.

It was the hot spring in the dormitories.

Perched immodestly on the edge of a steaming bath, a dozen judo teammates soaking happily next to him, the junior in economics said he picked this university when he saw the spa pictured in a brochure. The university's resort-like new dormitories also boast private karaoke rooms, an English garden with pink roses and a swimming pool.

"This was the only university to recruit us by offering a hot spring," Iwanaga, 21, said.

"They really wanted us to come here."

Japan has one of the oldest and most established systems of higher education in Asia, but today its universities are scrambling to find new ways to attract students. Years of falling birthrates have rapidly shrunk the population of young Japanese, leaving increasingly larger numbers of universities unable to find enough students to fill their classrooms and campuses.

The rapid graying of Japan's population has already made its presence felt in other parts of society, including the lower rungs of the nation's education system where hundreds of half-empty elementary and high schools have closed or been merged over the last two decades. But it has only recently begun to affect higher education.

According to census statistics, the number of 18-year-old Japanese has fallen to 1.3 million this year from 2.05 million in 1992, when the second peak of Japan's baby-boomers' children were entering universities. Estimates show it dropping to 1.21 million in two more years. This year, as a result, nearly a third of the nation's 707 four-year universities were unable to fill all of their openings, according to the Education Ministry and university groups.

So far, only three universities have gone bankrupt for lack of students, starting three years ago with Hiroshima's Risshikan University, the first Japanese university to fail since World War II. But the Education Ministry and university groups are busily drawing up new guidelines to help them deal with something few developed nations have had to face before: dozens of universities suddenly shutting down, or restructuring in other ways, including mergers.

"We are entering an era of survival of the fittest," said Yasuhiko Nishii, an official at the Promotion and Mutual Aid Corporation for Private Schools of Japan, the national association of private schools, including universities. "We need to find ways to let weaker universities close without disrupting the education of their students."

Many universities have responded by hunting for new pools of prospective students, like foreigners and "silver students," retirees who study for fun after leaving the work force. In March, Osaka University gave a doctorate in mathematics to a 71-year-old former engineer who entered graduate school after retirement.

At Fukuoka University of Economics, in this city on the southern island of Kyushu, administrators responded to the plunge in applications with a $50 million face-lift in 1999 to build lavish new dormitories, in which all 700 rooms are singles - a luxury on Japan's traditionally Spartan university campuses.

The university has cut annual tuition in half, to ¥590,000, or about $5,000. The university also created a Celebrity Business major to train professional entertainers, after administrators saw a survey showing many young Japanese now aspiring to creative pursuits like music, rather than the "salaryman" positions sought by their parents' generation.

"It used to be that students competed to get into universities," said Shunji Iba, a university official. "Now, universities have to compete to get students."

Still, the prospect of universities fighting to win students has prompted a national hand-wringing about the future of Japanese higher education. Since the nation's first modern university, the University of Tokyo, was founded in 1877, Japanese universities and their famously grueling entrance exams have served as the society's main mechanism for sorting its youth, tracking the brightest into top business and government jobs. Many fear that this mechanism could be impaired if universities lower their entrance standards to get more students.

But some university administrators say this sort of competition is good for Japan, forcing schools here to improve - or perish. One promising development has been a push by many universities to raise the quality of classroom instruction, a big change in a country where higher education has long been viewed as a four-year break before entering the work force.

Atsushi Hamana, president of the Kansai University of International Studies in Miki, Japan, says that schools are realizing that young people actually want to study to get the skills to compete in a globalizing economy.