ABSTRACT
One of the most important issues surrounding the international support and operation of higher education in recent years is the relative merits and strengths of public (State) and private (independent) colleges and universities. Until recent years serious discussions regarding the role of private higher education in national education policy were often characterized as being of idiosyncratic importance to American and Japanese policy analysts. After all, the United States and Japan were the only highly developed countries with any significant private sectors and the Japanese sector woefully underfunded and over enrolled in the 1970s and 1980s sometimes paled in comparison to the vigour of its American brethren.1
