Japanese further education college can in actuality turn out to be a super international?

This year marks the launch of the most ambitious attempt to change Japanese universities since World War II: in the Super Global University. Since April this year, 37 of Japan's leading universities - selected by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, or MEXT, last year - began to try to redefine the Japanese higher education for a new global era.

But what does Japan stand to gain from this massive reform? What would be successful? What opportunities and problems waiting for? And - depending on the outcome - what Japanese universities to look ten years from now?

Supporters of the reform provides universities as a new "global place 'where the best Japanese intellects and" great "scientists and students from abroad will cooperate advance the frontiers of knowledge.' Super 'global university will generate the technologies required for long renaissance in Chinese economic power.

New college graduates - foreign and Japanese - will provide 'global workforce are critical for success in the competitive global market strongly. They will be fluent in English, confident communicators and outward-looking representatives in Japan is recovering on the world stage.

It is, in any case, is an idyllic vision of promoting national policy makers. It is worrying, however, murmurs of disagreement are very guests at leading universities - it is the institutions that are supposed to lead this transformation. Why?

Deal

One of the main reasons is that the Japanese Faculty fear doubling their already heavy workload as a result of current reforms. Previous internationalization programs, such as the "Global 30", they need to teach more classes in English to foreign students who know something about Japan. Many also secretly suspect the potential for meaningful exchanges. Teaching foreign students and hosting visiting scientists want experience 'exotic' Japan have long term impairment of their fundamental research interests.

And older college recall repeated waves of "internationalization" of 1980 that led to the little substantive improvement. Previous experience leading many to assume that this time, too, the tide of "internationalization" will again fade, leaving the academic environment essentially unchanged.

But this time the world will not disappear. Since the 1980s, a truly global 'market' in the academic talent has emerged. Internationalization is no longer on the introduction of "Japan as Number One" on the world full of fear, but of survival in a complex and challenging global economic and political order.
Places like Singapore and the Gulf countries has in recent years sought rival US dominance through massive investment in higher education. Today, China and traditional European centers such as Germany are fast approaching. University curricula are overhauled, state-of-the-art research facilities installed and leading international scientists strive to entice institutions.

If the world remains far from Japan, so all of those things. So far, however, signs of fundamental change are difficult to detect in Japanese universities.