Abstract
The present paper deals with the change of the systems for the engineering education in the Japanese higher learning. Since the establishment of the Meiji Government in 1868 Japan has started to organize the modern school systems for the primary, the secondary, and the higher education. It was of special importance for the government at that time to establish universities of high standard of teaching and research in the fields of engineering since the nation had to make a solid foundation for its industrialization in order to follow and then to compete with the western countries. The Kobu Daigakko (The Imperial College of Engineering) was founded in 1873 (then called Kobu Ryo) as the nation’s first institution to train and provide higher engineers who would work for the public enterprise such as in telecommunications, railways, shipbuilding, and steel manufacturing. After the foundation of the technical college of the Imperial University in 1896 as a school of engineering of graduate level, by the merge of the Kobu Daigakko with the then existed faculty of engineering of the University of Tokyo, the Japanese government has made every effort to establish engineering colleges of undergraduate level nationwide that later became the higher technical schools. As a consequence, the engineering education had mostly been performed in the several imperial universities and the many higher technical schools until the drastic educational reform after World War II, which has led to the foundation of the undergraduate colleges and their graduate schools in a single-track educational system. Then, the system of the Kosen, the Colleges of Technology, was established in 1962, as modeled on the higher technical schools above, which is now the sole undergraduate engineering institution for students at the age of 15-20. The Kosen is a unique engineering institution, offering a continuous five-year engineering education that combines the system of secondary education and that of higher education. At present, Japan has a double-track system for engineering education with the sector of the Universities (undergraduate) and that of the Kosen (Colleges of Technology.) Now is the age of graduate school. Then, the undergraduate engineering education would become much more important in future than it is now and than it used to be.
