Tokyo seeks to staunch regional student exodus

[손명숙]

(Asia Today Tuesday 29 August 2017)

Tokyo seeks to staunch regional student exodus

Published: 4:00 AM, August 29, 2017

TOKYO — Japan is planning an enrolment cap for Tokyo’s private universities, in a move aimed at reversing a tide of ambitious 18-year-olds eager to abandon the provinces and study in the capital.

The plan to clip Tokyo’s academic wings is part of a broader drive to protect regional economies from implosion — a fate some consider inevitable as the country’s population ages and shrinks.

Particularly acute, say government officials, is the “drastic decline in the population of 18-year-olds” — a group whose ranks not only want to study in Tokyo, but are increasingly keen to remain in the capital after graduating, to work.

To reduce Tokyo’s sense of magnetism in an uneven economy, the proposed regulation will place an indefinite ban on any private university within Tokyo’s 23 wards from applying for an increase to its annual intake of new students.

Tokyo universities that are looking to shift or refine their academic focus by opening faculties, according to a Cabinet Office outline of the plan, will be forced to adopt a “scrap-and -build” system.

Under that regime, any student place at a new faculty can only be created by cutting a place from another.

The plan’s success, say officials, hinges upon regional universities — and the job markets nearby — raising their game.

“Universities have a major role to play in realising regional revitalisation, but not many of them are that successful in driving structural changes in regional industry,” said a report that sought to justify the Tokyo quota cap.

The report, which recommended that the cap come into force within the current fiscal year — which ends in March 2018 — warned that unless Tokyo’s dominance was offset, the fiances of regional universities would deteriorate.

Nearly five years into his premiership, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has come under significant pressure to shelve his intention to revise Japan’s Constitution and reaffirm the economy as his government’s main priority.

Regional revitalisation policies have included encouraging bank mergers and legalising casino gambling.

But despite these policies, the annual number of 20-24 year old Japanese moving into Tokyo has risen 35 per cent since Mr Abe became prime minister.

The idea of the enrolment cap was hatched by a team of regional revitalisation experts set up within the Cabinet Office in 2014 and given, among other missions, the job of redressing what it referred to as the “over-concentration” of students in Tokyo.

Between 1990 and 2005, student numbers in Tokyo’s 23 wards remained roughly flat at 380,000. In 2006, as the ferocity of corporate Japan’s restructuring began to hit regional economies, Tokyo’s universities threw open their doors.

By 2016, student numbers were almost 17 per cent higher at more than 455,000. FINANCIAL TIMES