When we talk about university education, it is necessary for any discussion of student characteristics and student culture to be based on empirical data.

　 The university system and university education have a big influence on the socialization of students. More specifically, the structure of a university, various groups within the university, the curriculum, and educational activities both within and outside the university have a formative influence on the acquisition of knowledge, job skills, and student values. The extent of the various influences on students varies in accordance with their background characteristics such as sex and social class, and with their grades, aspirations and values, as well as with parental expectations.

　 University students are more influenced by university classes than in the past. At the same time, many students still like to look on their university years as a kind of moratorium, during which they can challenge their potential and spend time on what they like doing. Moreover, students are looking for a “university as a community”, in which they can have various experiences.

　 Modern students tend to be obedient, and are easily influenced by their universities, their teachers and the kind of educational direction and guidance that they are given. However, the formation of autonomy and independence in students is also the purpose of university education.

　 How do university students position their university years within their life course as a whole? In order to advance university policy, it is necessary to collect empirical data on the actual condition of students and student culture by looking at how students build up their identity, acquire job skills and develop citizenship.

　 This paper aims to present, on the basis of a survey implemented by the author, an analysis of how university students create their own “distinctiveness” through the medium of their past experiences and their present college life from the standpoint of forming cultural capital. Previous studies have developed multifaceted approaches not only from the one-dimensional perspective of the reproduction of social classes, but in the context of grappling with many kinds of layered problems （gender, race, region, etc.） that have accompanied the diversification of social values. By means of research surveys conducted in universities in the Kansai and Hokuriku districts and in Joetsu University of Education, we were able to identify a tendency for students to form their cultural capital through pluralistic processes that anticipated socialization in terms of adapting to the various demands in their college life （work, search for employment, leisure...）, rather than using the cultural inheritance that they brought with them from their family homes. The crucial issue is that of reconsidering the question of how to build up variable cultural capital in today’s unstable changing society, which attaches a priority to individual flexibility and adaptability rather than to organizational structures.

　 The tendency to focus on college outcomes is becoming stronger within the wider framework of a trend toward universal access to higher education, quality assurance, and so on. However how college outcomes are linked with student characteristics, quality of education and student learning behavior has not been fully studied in Japan. On the basis of a student survey, this paper examines three issues : 1）After consideration is given to students’ pre-entry characteristics, are their cognitive outcomes regulated by the structural characteristics of a university or by the characteristics of its programs? 2）Are their cognitive outcomes more affected by the characteristics of a university program than by the university’s structural characteristics? 3）Does student engagement have the most powerful impact on cognitive outcomes? The paper also discusses the limitations and the problems of an analytical method and approach based on a student survey when considering college outcomes. In conclusion, it is recommended that particular notice is taken of student engagement as the most important factor influencing college outcomes rather than the college outcomes themselves.

　 Female students undertaking a Humanities Major were selected as subjects for the study presented in this paper, which empirically analyses the dimensions of career maturity vis-a-vis the three areas of education, employment and life.

　 The results of the analysis enabled differences in the career maturity of university students to be identified on the basis of the level of difficulty faced in entering a university. However, it was observed that while some students attending universities which were very difficult to enter had a more mature career focus（for instance, their views on pursuing higher education to a more advanced level）, there were also students attending universities which were relatively easy to enter who also showed a mature focus（for example, in terms of their perceptions of employment and life）. Consequently, it is not possible to make any generalization concerning the relationship between the difficulty of entering university and career maturity.

　 As the number of students going on to higher education continues to grow, the needs and patterns of the career consciousness of university students will diversify. As a result, I believe there will be an increasingly strong demand for an independent investigation into and implementation of career education and support that is tailored to the career consciousness of students from each university.

　 Since the early 1990 s, there has been an increase in the number of the university graduates who have remained jobless for long periods or have become part-time workers, especially graduates of non-selective 4 year-universities （institutions which accept almost anyone who applies to them）which have increased over the same period. There are very few studies with reliable data which have attempted to analyze the process of job-hunting activities on the part of the students of such universities.

　 In this paper, I have tried to analyze by means of three large-scale studies the job-hunting process carried out by students at these universities and the career support provided. The findings are as follows.

　 First of all, the students at non-selective universities were slow in starting to search for a job, and contacted only a few companies. Graduates of non-selective universities in 1995 also contacted fewer companies than graduates of selective universities, but the starting time of the search process was almost the same in both cases, one year before graduation. However, students from selective universities were under constant peer pressure to bring forward the starting date.

　 Secondly, the career services at many universities, with the cooperation of teachers, were well established in tackling job identification, and the students at non-selective universities make greater use of these services. Moreover, the usage had some effect in terms of raising the employment rate. The graduates in 1995 made less use of the career services.

　 Thirdly, the satisfaction of each student in the process of job-hunting was found to be lower for the students from non-selective institutions. Though what makes students satisfied was different in relation to the selectivity of the universities, the importance for all of encouragement to make an early start in searching for a job and study hard emerged clearly from the findings.

　 This paper focuses on transfer students who continue to study while moving between two or more institutions and aims to explore the current status and future prospect of transfer students in Japan.

　 Since the mid-90s, opportunities for university admission have been widening owing to the decline of the18-year old population. The greater the number of young people going on to higher education, the more factors such as scholastic achievement, learning aspirations, career prospects, and so on, have come to be diversified. At the same time, entrance examinations have rapidly lost their effectiveness in terms of maintaining the quality of students. This situation can give rise to various mismatches between students’ expectations and the education offered to them. What comes to be recognized in these circumstances is the importance of facilitating educational career change even after enrollment, and of constructing a system whereby students are able to accumulate educational suitable learning experience for themselves in order to solve the kind of mismatches referred to above.

　 The following points were clarified through an empirical analysis of survey data:・The number of transfer students did not increase over the past several years, though it was expected that it would.・However, the percentage of students who hope to transfer is significantly high compared with the number of students who actually move.・The factors that prevent students transferring should not be attributed to any inflexibility within the Japanese higher education system, because various policy measures to facilitate student transfer were implemented after the 1990s. Hence it is difficult to imagine in the present situation that student transfer would be further promoted by making the system still more flexible.

　 On the basis of the above findings, various reflections are offered on the kind of conditions that will be needed to make student transfer become more frequent in the future.

　 The aims of this paper are 1）to identify an analytical research framework shared by the special papers in this compilation，2）to locate these papers and their relationship within this framework, and 3）to examine future research issues targeting university students. The analytical perspective of a shared research framework serves to add an analysis of the educational process when analyzing the opinions and behaviors of students, to clarify the level of differentiation among students, and to examine the presence or absence of social inequalities among students.

　 Each of the special papers is located on a matrix which is composed of one temporal axis covering the time from university entrance to graduation and another axis recording students’ experiences from formal educational program to extracurricular activities.

　 There is a need to put more effort into exploring the following three points as research issues : 1）deepening research into a comparison of the degree to which students’ values changed during the institutional educational process and the extent of ongoing influence from the attributes they possessed before entering university, 2）widening the concept of ‘students’ to include working adults, foreign students, etc., and 3）conducting large-scale panel surveys.

　 This paper aims to explore the fundamental requirements of professional development in teaching and learning for academic staff in higher education. Nowadays, most universities in Japan are struggling with the issue of how to implement faculty development, and the professional development of teaching and learning is left to individual efforts. Professional support for such development is urgently needed.

　 Against this background, the Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education in the United Kingdom is presented as a model of a core programme for teaching and learning.

　 As the result of a review comparing programmes at four higher education institutions, I describe some characteristic features in the structure of the certificate programmes. They are designed on the basis of the UK Professional Standards Framework for teaching and supporting learning in higher education, which is well suited to both the national context of higher education in the learning society and the requirements of the university learning experience. The main purpose of the programmes is to foster professional teaching by participants that facilitates not surface learning but deep learning on the part of their students. They also enhance scholarship in teaching as well as in research.

　 Finally, I conclude that this particular certificate programme shows us that the professional development of teaching in higher education cannot make progress without systematic, scholarly and strategic support from institutions. This example could provide a benchmark for Japan when we discuss constructive professional development for teaching and learning and a framework of professional standards within the teaching role in higher education.

　 Previous studies on American for-profit universities have often targeted large-scale schools, such as the University of Phoenix. The result of this is that there is a tendency for the characteristics of large-scale for-profit universities to be seen as those of the entire for-profit university sector. However, when these characteristics are looked at within the context of the sector as a whole, it is reasonable to assume that they include elements specific to the universities studied, since the number of large-scale for-profit universities is only a handful of the total number of for-profit universities in the U. S.

　 In this research, we verified the characteristics of U. S. for-profit universities in greater detail on the basis of comprehensive data from NCES and other sources in order to present a full picture of the entire U. S. for-profit university sector. As a result, we identified characteristics that are different from those of earlier studies when comparing for-profit universities with public or private ones : 1） the proportion of full-time students is high ; 2）only a small proportion of the universities have introduced online education.

　 Next, we considered the cause of the differences from the viewpoint of eligibility for Federal Student Aid（Title IV）: especially, eligibility for the Pell Grant. As a result, we found that the for-profit universities have developed by adapting their management strategy to Federal Student Aid programs including the Pell Grant. Furthermore, the for-profit universities expanded the coverage of this program through lobbying etc., and as a result, they earned 55 to 62% of their entire income from this program.

　 The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology has been encouraging individual high schools to develop a diverse range of unique characteristics. Accompanying this development in schools, universities have decreased the number of subjects that they require applicants to take in their university entrance examinations. As a result, there are a variety of combinations of required subjects.

　 However, there are a significant number of small high schools in Japan. Small schools are not always able to offer many subjects to students because they have an insufficient number of teachers.

　 The purpose of this study is to identify characteristics of the curriculum of small public high schools that provide general courses and analyze them from the viewpoint of equal opportunity to access to higher education.

　 The data used in this research were collected from high schools across the country in January 2003.

　 A school with less than 240 students was defined as ‘a small school’. The data were analyzed in terms of the following points. 1）University advancement rate and the location of the school. 2）Courses provided by the school. Next, we compared the number of units and the contents in subjects in the curricula of the ‘small schools’ with those of schools with low university advancement rate（less than forty percent）and those of the average obtained from our research. We found that : 1）The university advancement rates of ‘small schools’ are in general low. 2）Hokkaido has many ‘small schools’. 3）‘Small schools’ have a tendency not to offer subjects geared to university entrance examinations. 4）The ‘small schools’ tend to provide fewer courses than the national average. 5）The ‘small schools’have fewer units in subjects such as Japanese, mathematics, English, social sciences and sciences.

　 These characteristics make it difficult for students in a ‘small public high school’ to prepare for university entrance examinations. We have to find a means of remedying this disparity.

　 University siting policy is a complex mixture of different kinds of laws and regulations. On the one hand, there are laws limiting the construction and enlargement of university buildings, and on the other hand, laws and regulations governing the establishment of new universities, the size and number of departments, student capacity, and so on. This paper examines the impact of university siting policy through a quantitative and qualitative analysis of changes over time in the number of undergraduate students and the relocation of universities and departments. The years selected as time reference points are 1955, 1965, 1975, 1985, 1995 and 2005.

　 Previous studies have focused mainly on national-level policies, which have been concerned chiefly with raising the numbers of students going on to universities or reducing the disparities between different local areas in access to higher education. There have also been many quantitative analyses of the effects of university siting policy on the movement of students. However, more attention needs to be paid to the impact of siting policy on urban areas, especially metropolitan Tokyo, so as to clarify the real effect of regulations and laws.

　 With the above points in mind, this paper uses a database consisting of the numbers of undergraduate students and the detailed location of departments, grades and courses in each university in Tokyo, to make a qualitative analysis of university siting and a quantitative analysis of changes in student numbers and in locations.

　 The main results are that (1) the regulatory effect of policies in terms of dampening the creation and enlargement of faculties in Tokyo was most evident in the period 1975-85, and (2) a comparison of data for 1995 and 2005 shows clearly that even after the deregulation of siting policy in 1995, the number of undergraduate students who have returned to the central area of Tokyo is still very limited.