ABSTRACT
This chapter identifies and analyzes the profiles of various kinds of Japanese private higher education (PHE) institutions that all are facing sustained and enormous demographic pressure. Not merely recent or post-war phenomenon, Japan’s highly diversified PHE sector is the powerful reality from over a century and a half of development. Unusual for such diversity encompassing elite prestigious universities and vocational open-entry institutions, Japan achieved such diversity within a private sector holding the vast majority (80%) of its student enrollment. An astonishing reality to have achieved over a period of mostly rising demographic and lower educational-level expansion, maintaining such a reality under severe national and higher education demographic decline has more recently become its own feat. It has involved ample challenges and vulnerabilities, private institutions struggling for survival amid the demographic challenge, and through changing relationships with the student market, industry, and national and local governments. Unsurprisingly, responses and results vary across PHE segments, as well as in public higher education. Finally, the chapter reflects broadly on the nature of public versus private higher education and on internal diversity within the PHE sector in Japan.
