The Conundrum of Globally Minded Japanese Universities

As Tokyo declares the second state of emergency for the ever-increasing number of cases of COVID-19 in the greater metropolitan area, one of the focal points of the lasting long-term damage from the policy may be education. In a nation that is already facing a steadily declining and aging population, with an ever-lower number of births before COVID, any government signaling that the pandemic is not completely under control is only going to dampen the enthusiasm of its young citizens reproducing. The possibilities of offsprings facing interrupted education and a not-so-vibrant economy in which jobs are difficult to find will only further the deterrence.

To be sure, the Japanese government has so far committed to educational institutions operating as smoothly and normally as possible under the circumstances of countermeasures against the pandemic's spread. Not only are university entrance exams still taking place as scheduled, but the schools themselves, despite reducing classroom instructions, have not suspended the intake of students for the coming school year. Students going through the Japanese educational system today, at least on the surface, is expected to start and finish the process in the same way that those that came the years before them.

The same cannot be said of international students who are dreaming of studying abroad in Japan and developing their careers in the country after graduation. With international borders firmly shut to those without long-term residence visas, too much uncertainty lies with whether it is possible to enter and live in the country at the moment for everyone but the most determined to consider studying in the country to be truly realistic. As international applications drop off a cliff as a result, Japanese universities may see their global ambitions inhibited at least for the next few years.

The lack of international students will hit the Japanese educational sector hard. The government ambitiously spoke about bringing in 300,000 international students into the country at any point in time to make the sector a new engine of growth in the service economy. Many top-rated universities, with an eye both to piggyback on the government ambitions and as a way to shore up their international rankings, no doubt invested in facilities and personnel to better accommodate the forecasted growth in the number of foreign students. For now, all those investments have come to naught.

Yet, paradoxically, it might be the Japanese universities that are least prepared for the globalization of their student bodies that will face the greatest long-term harm from COVID-19. As the number of youngsters dwindles in the years following the outbreak of the pandemic, a growing share of the total student population will go to the nation's top universities, even if those top universities do not increase the size of their respective intakes. In tandem, local universities will little resources to advertise their presence globally and invest in initiatives targeting foreign students who will find themselves unable to fill their existing places even with just domestic students.

Such local universities may then find themselves in a vicious cycle of financial deterioration. The ever-decreasing number of domestic students threaten their financial health and make it even more difficult to find enough money to advertise to improve teaching and marketing both in Japan and abroad. The resulting lack of internationalization in the student body then further undermines these universities' long-term financial health as they fail to build up a sufficiently strong international reputation to enable organic growth of international applicants over time.

In contrast, top-tier Japanese universities may be increasingly willing to turn away foreign students as they find it increasingly possible to get away with just taking an ever-larger share of domestic students. As lower-tier local universities collapse from financial issues stemming from lack of students, more and more students have no choice but to move across the country to enroll in national universities just to fulfill their dream of graduating from universities. With laws that often force universities to charge the same tuition fees to both local and international students, top schools would be financially wise to focus on local students, who cheaper to teach because they do not need tailored multilingual support and facilities.

The result may be a lose-lose situation in which foreign students find themselves outcompete in the best Japanese universities and ever-fewer choices in lower-tier universities. Left to their own devices, Japanese universities may very much roll back whatever internationalization initiatives they undertook in the years before COVID wreaked havoc. To keep globalization going under the current circumstances, it has become ever more important for both governments and private firms to step in and provide the financial and human resources to universities to continue efforts to enroll foreign students.