Abstract
The fundamental purpose of this book is to analyze college-going behavior both theoretically and empirically. For this purpose, it is useful to understand some basic facts which can be observed in education data from Japan. In this chapter, we first observe in Sect. 1.1 the percentage of Japanese students who went to college in the past several decades. Then we undertake some international comparisons in Sect. 1.2. By doing so, we can confirm how the percentage has varied in Japan and whether it is high in comparison with other major advanced countries. Sect. 3.3 explains the basic questions of this book and shows how they will be answered by giving a summary of each chapter.1
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Notes
When this book uses the term “college” in the case of Japan, it refers either to four-year institutions (university) only or to both four-year institutions and junior colleges, which are two-year institutions. (Of course, it sometimes clearly distinguishes the two types of institutions.) This is because it is cumbersome to repeatedly use the term “college and junior college”. The author tries to use the term “college” so that the reader can understand from the context what is meant by it. The term “college” is also used for “university” in other countries.
See Dore (1965), Passin (1965), Rubinger (1982), Arai (1990a), and so on for the education in the Edo Period and in the initial stage of modern economic growth in Japan.
See Ministry of Education, International Comparisons of Education Indicators. It has also definitions of the terms used.
Dropouts are rare in Japanese higher education.
If not limited to higher education, the increase in the level of women’s education (relative to that of men’s) is a world-wide tendency this century (Schultz, 1993).
Not all applicants are admitted to college or junior college in Japan. Each institution requires the applicants to take an entrance examination and admits only a portion of them. Every year there are some students who apply but are not admitted to any institution. The application rate is defined as the number of students who applied for at least one institution divided by the number of graduates from junior high school three years previous.
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© 1998 Kazuhiro Arai
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Arai, K. (1998). Basic Facts and the Purposes of This Book. In: The Economics of Education. Springer, Tokyo. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-66905-0_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-66905-0_1
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