Abstract
The number of universities in Japan has increased to 709 schools by 2004, and it is expected that whoever wants to enter a university will be able to do so more easily from the 2007 academic year. A drawback of this situation, however, is the deterioration of the overall quality of incoming students. This development has been observed in engineering schools as well, unfortunately. In the 2004 academic year, undergraduate student enrollment surpassed 110,000. Meanwhile, Japanese corporations continue with their in-house career development training for new and current employees in order to strengthen corporate competitiveness and as a buffer or counter to the degradation of the quality of graduates. A notable feature of engineering schools is the diversification of departments. As almost half of graduate school courses were newly established, traditional engineering disciplines are in danger of collapsing. How engineering education should be revamped to meet with this crisis will be discussed in this paper.
