近代日本における高等教育と社会移動

抄録

Institutions of higher education in Japan produced “highly educated manpower” amounting to about 40, 000 in number, in the last quater of the nineteenth century or the first stage of modernization. This article aims to analyze the characteristics which those highly educated manpower had as a group and also to elucidate the roles that higher education played in promoting social mobility in the beginning stage of modernization of Japan.
(1) Educational characteristics: Of highly educated manpower produced from 1876 to 1900 (40, 135), 45% were graduated from national and local public institutions, and 55% from private institutions. The highest 43% of them studied social sciences, followed by 36% for medical sciences and 10% each for humanities and natural sciences. Eighty per cent of graduates from social sciences specialized in law. To be noted is the fact that only 12% were university graduates, the remaining being graduates of professional schools.
(2) Social classes: Many of the graduates from higher education at this stage of development were from the samurai class. Especially in national institutions, more than half of their graduates were of the samurai origin, while in private institutions, nearly 70% were commoners. The proportions of graduates from the samurai class differed from one field of study to another: They were comparatively high in the fields of law and engineering, while more than half were commoners in the medical field from the beginning.
(3) Social allocations: In the beginning of the twentieth century, graduates from institutions of higher learning were allocated to each occupation as follows: Almost half of the graduates of the Tokyo Imperial University became government officials, , while only 17% sought their employment in industry. Nearly 40% of the graduates from engineering department, however, entered employment in industry. More than half of the graduates from national professional schools were already employed by enterprises. For private institutions, the Keio produced many industrialists (35%) and small independent enterprisers (26%), and the Waseda turned out many journalists and political leaders at the local level. The other private institutions (mostly law schools) trained judicial officers, low-level government officials, lawyers, and local middle level-leaders.
The above analysis indicates that there was distinctive relationship in the early stage of development between social classes, institutions of higher education and occupational structures; i. e. the samurai class which had been governing the feudalistic society, found their way through national institutions into modern occupations, among others, government officials and various government enterprises. On the other hand, the bourgeois class in urban and rural areas went into independent professional occupations, small independent enterprises, low level government officials, and private enterprises which were growing in those days.