This paper aims to clarify, on the basis of quantitative data, diversification and change in the internal organization of Japanese higher education.

　 Currently, Japanese higher education institutions are facing a major challenge in the form of transforming themselves into autonomous bodies within the context of increased freedom from governmental control. The reform of internal organization is a primary topic, exemplified in such ways as the transformation of faculty organization and the re-distribution of decision-making authority. In this current Japanese context, there is a need for a greater accumulation of research on Japanese higher education management and organization, on both a theoretical and experimental level, but a sufficient quantity of research has not yet been carried out.

　 In the light of this situation, this paper describes changes in the composition of departments, faculty organizations, decision-making authorities, institutional goals and roles, and their relationship to Japanese higher education institutions on the basis of various kinds of quantitative data. In fact, it is already possible to see continuous increase and various changes in internal organization. Those internal organizational changes, however, have had only a relatively minor effect on institutional goals and roles, which were more highly affected by the traditional, static hierarchy of Japanese higher education in terms of such factors as history, size and market evaluation. The span of change is still so short that as a result of limited data, it is impossible to be precise about the exact effects. Hence there is a requirement for long-term and observation in order to give greater substance to researches on Japanese higher education management and organization.

　 The aim of this paper is to clarify the influences exerted by changes in the higher education system on universities in Japan. Changes in regulations concerning the approval of the establishment of universities cause changes in the supply of university education, an increase in the number of graduate students leads to changes in educational conditions, and the transformation of the status of national universities into corporate bodies results in changes in funding allocation. These changes have been analyzed with a view to investigating their influences on career choices made by high school students, the relationships between university students and teachers, the hierarchical structure of national universities, and funding allocation to university teachers.

　 The results of the analysis are as follows. The supply structure of university education has changed so much that regional differences with regard to university education have been increasing since 1990. An increase in the number of graduatestudents has been accompanied by a worsening in the student/teacher ratio in classes, along with a change in the quality of graduate students. With regard to the financial aspect, the hierarchical structure of national universities has not changed much, but the differences among researchers in terms of the research funds they receive has shown a marked increase. Specifically, local high school students witha proportionally low chance of receiving university education, changes in the nature of students, thereby posing fresh challenges to university teachers, and instability in the allocation of research funding are the results of being tossed about by changes in the higher education system.

　 Higher education institutions in Japan, whether in the national, local public or private sector, are financed more or less by the government with regard to their characteristics in terms of financial functions. Specifically, they are expected to perform at least one of the following three functions : resource allocation, income redistribution, or economic stabilization. It is fair to say that they have to explain their effectiveness in terms of the above function（s）as the means of justifying receipt of public finance.

　 For the past 20 years, Japanese higher education institutions have agonized over the sluggishness of their recurrent income from the government, while on the other hand, the volume of government research grants provided in a more competitive and selective context as well as funding from other private sources resulting from the growth of joint research ventures has sky-rocketed during the preceding decade. In these circumstances, more public money has flowed to the more research-competitive sector（national universities）, and even within this sector, funding has flowed to a limited number of the top-tier research-oriented institutions. Now we are witnessing a growing dichotomization or disparity as winners win more and losers lose more.

　 One of the most unique mechanisms of Japanese public financing is the socalled “Fiscal Investment and Loan Program （FILP）.” This program has maintained a very close relationship with the Japanese higher education sector; for example, it has made loans to that sector for the purpose of financing construction projects and student loan programs. The budget for these items used to be taken from the system of compulsory deposits in postal savings and pension reserves ; however, the budgetary mechanism was totally reformed in 2001, and now FILP collects money from the financial market by issuing its own bonds. Thus, the higher education sector in Japan has automatically become dependent, albeit in an indirect way, on the financial market.

　 Regarding the student loan programs, they have become extremely active since 1999, and FILP has given substantial support to these programs by means of loans. It is clear from an examination of Gini-coefficients that these programs have worked well in terms of improving economic equality among families which include university students. The kind of research outlined here should be further pursued with the aim of providing justification of making higher education a policy priority.

　 This paper has three objectives.

　 One is to clarify the structural changes in university teachers since 1990 on the basis of the expected images of university teachers shown in various council reports since 1984 when the Japanese Ad Hoc Council for Education was established. The second is to clarify how these structural changes influenced the educational and the research activities of university teachers. The third purpose is to clarify the way to promote the activities of the university teacher on the basis of these results.

　 The characteristics of the structural changes in university teachers over the past 20 years are an increase in the percentage of newly-appointed university teachers who had experience of a workplace other than the university, a rise in the percentage of female teachers among all university teachers, and a rise in the percentage of foreign university teachers（from 1.2% in 1983 to 3.4 % in 2007）. However, the fall in the ratio of students who completed their course in their own university to the total number of university teachers was held at about 10 percent.

　 Next, the paper confirms the ways in which the structural changes on the part of university teachers, and their consciousness and actions in respect of their educational and their research activities have influenced the focus of their interests, the level of their participation in FD activity, the total number of hours spent in a week on educational and research activities, and the total quantity of research results during the past 3 years.

　 The following four points are clarified.

　 First, the difference in sex of university teacher had no intentional influence on their consciousness or actions concerning their educational and their research activities.

　 Next, there was a larger quantity of research results produced by a university teacher with experience of a workplace other than the university compared with the quantity of study results produced by university teacher who had no experience of a workplace other than the university.

　 Moreover, the level of the participation in FD by the university teacher who graduated from the present workplace was low compared with the university teacher who did not graduate from the present workplace. Also, the total quantity of research results produced by the university teacher who graduated from the present workplace was greater than the total quantity of research results produced by the university teacher who did not graduate from the present workplace.

　 Lastly, the teacher with ample research funding during the past 3 years had a stronger interest in research activities and published more research results than the teacher with a low level of research funding during the past 3 years. This tendency became stronger in 2007 compared to 1992.

　 Although the number of research hours in 2007 was fewer than in 1992, the total quantity of research results expanded. This is because the total sum of competitive research funding expanded and able researchers were picked up by workplaces other than universities for the research periods.

　 In order to bring about improvements in the future in the quality of the educational activities, the research activities and the social service activities carried out by university teachers, the following points may be considered important : decreasing management time and increasing the time spent on other activities, expanding the budget to support university reform, training and employing able human resources to support university functions and putting emphasis on the professional development of the clerical staff who support the activities of the university teachers.

　 The role of non-academic staff in Japanese universities has been expanding as a result of the rapid changes that have taken place in universities and their environment. Since the beginning of the 1990s, universities have experienced various kinds of reforms, and people have realized that more attention must be paid to the role of non-academic university staff, who must be adequately trained in order for university management to be improved.

　 In reality, however, less regard has been given to such staff in terms of university management partly because of the dominant position of academic staff and partly because the staff themselves have tended to have fewer incentives to improve their position and their ability to carry out management roles.

　 In addition to this general problem, national, local public and private universities each have their own unique staff problems which are different from one another. One example is that, in national universities, local staff are not promoted above middle management level while top managers are seconded to the universities from the Ministry of Education. Following the incorporation of national universities, this two-tier personnel system must be modified.

　 Recently, many universities have set up their own programs of training for non-academic staff, and organizations such as the National University Association and others, have also started systematic and comprehensive training programs. In addition it should be noted that some institutions have launched graduate programs for non-academic staff.

　 While some people still have doubts about the positive motivation of such staff, utilization of their own powers by universities is indispensable if better management is to be achieved. Universities are expected to play a key role in the knowledge-based society, and it follows from this that the non-academic staff are also expected to play more important roles.

　 This paper aims to analyze how the undergraduate curriculum in Japanese universities has been changed since 1991. At first, the paper examines the discussions concerning the undergraduate curriculum held by Japan’s Central Council for Education and the University Council in Japan’s postwar period and what they recommended.

　 It seems that many universities in Japan tried to reform their undergraduate education on the basis of the recommendations of these bodies. However, the results of surveys found that such reforms did not lead directly to improvements in the quality of their education.

　 In order to improve the quality of the undergraduate education, this paper suggests that more research on the curriculum development of higher education from the viewpoint of curriculum management should be developed and that new indicators to evaluate the curriculum should be developed. The paper also suggests that more attention should be paid to movements in the direction of internationalizing the assessment of higher education.

　 This paper aims to investigate what kinds of consequences have resulted from university reform since the 1990 s, including the reform of research activities. University reform has been driven by three kinds of philosophies or models : 1） the growth model, in which the prioritization of basic research and the expansion of graduate education formed the baseline for the transformation of university research in the early 1990 s, but which has gradually been replaced since the mid-1990 s by 2）the innovation model, which regards the relationship between science and technology on the one hand and social and economic values on the other as the most important factor in exploiting research activities with the aim of promoting national prosperity, and 3）the new-public-management model, which emphasizes administrative and fiscal efficiency.

　 The preliminary results of the analysis indicate that the reform carried out in the 1990 s enhanced university research activities as a whole. However, it is not possible to identify reliable evidence confirming that reforms since 2000 have produced beneficial effects in university research. It is rather the case that the gap separating some universities from others has expanded. Many problems have been caused by the increase in the number of postdoctoral researchers, and we are now faced by several questions : whether reform driven by the “selection and concentration” principle is appropriate for the enhancement of university research, whether reforms have caused inconsistencies in the university system, and whether excessive emphasis has been placed on rule-making and system modification at the expense of operational aspects of the system.

　 The aim of this special edition is to review what changes recent university reforms have brought about. With that aim in mind, this edition is composed of papers in which seven aspects of universities are analyzed. On the basis of the results of this analysis, this paper set out to provide a comprehensive review of the reforms since the Ad Hoc Council for Education. The Japanese university system has been transformed in many ways, and the disparities between institutions have become noticeably large. The reason why we regard disparity as a social problem arises from the fear that it will have a deleterious effect on education and research as the twin roles performed by a university. In fact, we are already starting to be able to discern the harmful effects on research, but there are many aspects of the situation that are still not entirely clear. There is a need for further research in the form of a detailed examination of the results of university reforms during the past twenty years.

　 On the basis of the author’s own experience of trying to forecast the future demand for teachers in public-sector schools from 2002 to 2007 in each of Japan’s 47 prefectures, this paper aims to examine the possibility of “evidence-based policy”. Almost 90% of the number of pupils forecast by the author corresponded to the actual number, as did the forecast of the number of teachers needed, but when it came to forecasting the number of annual new recruits, only 7% of the forecast came within an error margin of 5%. The reason for this is that the retirement and drop-out ratio of school teachers is different from prefecture to prefecture, but the official statistics do not provide annual retirement and drop-out numbers by prefecture, and researchers have to assume a uniform number for the whole country.

　 As is clear from this example, in order to realize “evidence-based policy,” the most indispensable factor is validation by a third party. Various kinds of research results are published, but what society in general wants to know is which of the results are accurate and which can be trusted. In order to provide a guarantee of third-party validation, it is necessary for all the data used by researchers and for all the details of the data processing to be made public. With this aim in mind, there is a need for web sites to be constructed by our Association, in such a way that the data used for research can be made public and so that it can be validated by third parties.

　 In many universities, follow-up studies often aim to examine whether or not students have succeeded in their university life. However, when analyzing followup study data, considerable attention must be paid to a）the problem of selection effect, which is caused by cutting off the distribution at the passing grade, with the result that when we see the value of the correlation coefficient, there is a tendency to misinterpret it ; b）the statistical hypothesis testing problem, which is caused by using a huge amount of sample data so that even a slight difference is detected as statistically significant（p-value orχ2-value）; and c）the multicollinearity problem, which is caused by a high trend toward one factor and a high coefficient of Cronbach’s alpha, so that we tend to interpret the wrong sign in Multiple Regression Analysis. In order to avoid these three problems, we suggest a statistically correct method of carrying out follow-up studies.

　 We used the Japan College Student Survey（JCSS）data on 6228 college students in 2007 ; this is the Japanese version of the College Student Survey （CSS）produced by the Higher Education Research Institute（HERI）of UCLA. Specifically, we used the following questions : I）Is this college your first choice or not?, II）If you could make your college choice over, would you still choose to enroll at your current college?, III）Are you satisfied with your college life?, IV) What was your average grade in high school?, V）What is the average grade you received during your college career?, and VI）Which degree will you eventually earn?. By analyzing the resulting data by means of Latent Class Analysis, we have been able to classify college students into the following 5 categories : 1）Enjoyment of university life, 2）Satisfaction with university studies, 3）Enhanced motivation after reluctant entrance, 4）Disappointed after entrance, and 5）Decreasing motivation after reluctant entrance.

　 This method of carrying out a study will produce an evaluation of students from affective, behavioral and commitment perspectives, and by connecting student classifications with college student survey data and the information about articulation from high school to college, universities will obtain enough information to enable them to improve bachelor courses for each student group.

　 The aim of this paper is to analyze the structure of choice involved in a transfer and the impact of the transfer experience on students in Japan by focusing on how they adapt to their new university environment and on what changes occur before and after transferring. The data were collected from 23 schools and/or universities during November and December 2007 and include the opinions of 239 transfer students.

　 I used Wilcoxon’s sign rank sum test to analyze three specific quantitative variables : the overall degree of satisfaction felt by transfer students, their motivation, and their sense of academic achievement. In addition, I evaluated statements made in response to open-ended questions regarding the advantages and disadvantages of transferring.

　 Primary results include 1） students transferring from junior colleges experience a decline in satisfaction, motivation, and sense of academic achievement ; 2）students transferring from colleges of technology experience a decline in satisfaction and sense of academic achievement ; 3） students transferring from specialized training colleges experience a decline in motivation and sense of academic achievement ; 4）students transferring from one bachelor degree course to another experience enhancements of satisfaction and motivation, but not of their sense of academic achievement ; 5）transfer students feel the imperative to participate in pre-existing “native” student networks, and to start searching for jobs toward the end of their junior year.

　 I conjecture that this general tendency toward dissatisfaction occurs because there is no inbuilt assumption in the structure of the Japanese undergraduate system that many students will transfer, and I maintain that universities should intervene in the processes of transfer and help students to adapt smoothly to their new environment. Furthermore, the implications for further research include the following : 1）more analysis is needed from the perspective of students’ precollege demographics（socio-economic status, achievements in high school, etc．） 2）a large panel data set is needed in order to statistically analyze relationships between pre-college and post-college demographics in more detail, including the impact of transferring on competition in the job market.

　 The purpose of this paper is to clarify the degree of standardization in university education. To provide a basis for empirical analysis, I have evaluated various textbooks used in universities, focusing on the indexes found at the end of the textbooks. Firstly, in order to analyze the degree of standardization, I select and compare three fields（education, physics, and accounting）and three points in time（the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s）. Secondly, I focus on words which are frequently used in indexes and clarify the variation in the content of the textbooks by reference to the usage of these words.

　 The findings of this paper are as follows : 1）These three fields are in the process of becoming standardized. 2）The natural sciences have a tendency to be more standardized than the social sciences and humanities. Moreover, in the social sciences and humanities, accounting is more standardized than education. 3）The degree of the variation in the contents is different in each of the three fields. That is to say, the variation of textbook content in physics is low, the variation of textbook content in education is high, and the variation of textbook content in accounting shows less consistency than the other two fields.