Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to analyze the process of pursuing university education in Japan, and how studying in a national/private junior high school influences this process. The comparison of students who entered national/private junior high schools through the entrance examination and students who entered public junior high schools without entrance examinations has not yet been explored in previous studies. Since there is an entrance examination, there will be a difference in academic achievement of students from a public junior high school and students from a national/private junior high school. Therefore, this difference between public junior high school and national/private junior high school will later greatly influence the process of going to university. The data is based on the author's 2004 survey of freshmen which was conducted at 9 universities (Sociology/Human Sciences) in Kansai. According to this analysis, the rate of entrance to high ranking universities by students from national/private junior high schools is higher than that of students from public junior high schools. However, there is also the difference between unified secondary schools and non-unified secondary schools among the national/private junior high schools. Then, focusing attention on this difference, further analysis was conducted. As a result, even in the national/private junior high schools, the unified secondary schools raised the rate of entrance to universities with a high level of difficulty. This reveals that the national/private junior high schools had no effect on entrance to high ranking universities, but junior high schools of a unified secondary school system have an effect on entrance to high ranking universities. Recently, the unified secondary school system is also being conducted in public schools. However, like national/private schools, public unified secondary schools also conduct entrance examinations. From this, the practice of creating public unified secondary school systems could cause disparities between public schools.
