高等教育政策の転換と競争的資金供給

抄録

The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology launched“the 21st Century Center of Excellence (COE) Program”in fiscal year 2002. Right after the COE program, the Distinctive University Education Support Program (Good Practice [GP] ) started as an educational version of the COE program in fiscal year 2003, and the program expanded to various educational areas thereafter. Because of the overwhelming growth of demand for higher education services, the postwar Japanese higher education policy based mainly on the university chartering standard as an exante qualification of higher education. But since 1991 as the rapid reduction of 18 age population started, the Japanese higher education policy changed to a more competition and deregulation oriented ones. The ministry's new policy aims to bring about more vigorous competitive environment for the inter-university competition through national, public and private universities. Using the data of 499 universities which applied to the COE program and/ or the GP program, this paper examines the recent competition oriented policy using several numerical analyses. Some findings are as follows (1) the Japanese higher education policy which based mainly on the university chartering is found to be useful to assure the quality of research in national universities, (2) but which also brought forth the quality differ-entiation in research between the national, public and private universities, and the uniformity of education through these universities, (3) the GP programs which originally aimed at the improvement in the educational quality through the competitive subsidization, choose university programs whose quality of research are high.