This paper discusses the direction of change in relation to three aspects which can be seen as characterizing the development of the articulation process between high school and college education in Japan in recent years.　 The first is the increase in admission based on a recommendation from the applicant’s high school and criteria drawn up by the Admissions Office (AO) in contrast to the general selection process based on an academically competitive examination. The number of university and junior college entrants in the former category is increasing despite a marked reduction in the 18 year-old population, and this alternative selection process has become a significant factor contributing to the stable management and financial situation of HE institutions in terms of effectively functioning as a marketing strategy. That said, it does not signify a fundamental paradigm change.

　 The second changing aspect is the decline of the student academic achievement level. Under conditions in which the intake capacity of colleges expanded and the number of entrants increased, colleges had to try and cope with a wide ability range, and as a result, there has been an inevitable drop in the validity of the university entrance examination as a selection tool. This is the cause of the decline in the level of student learning motivation. However, from a pedagogical viewpoint, it is clear that a fixed level of academic ability must be set as a minimum condition of entry to college. Thus there is no change in the importance of subject tests as tools to evaluate the level of a student’s academic ability.

　 The third changing aspect is that of individual ability achievement tests carried out by each college and the number of subjects to be tested has been reduced. Examinees are able to choose which subjects are to be tested. Indeed, each college has created its own way of testing subjects. As a result, expectations regarding the test set by the National Center for University Entrance Examinations have become relatively greater, and it has become impossible to see its role as limited to measuring the basic average achievement level of students at the time of high school graduation.

　 Moreover, examinees have become more diversified, and there has been an increase in the number of students who no longer see the national center test in terms of competitive selection, but rather see it as a kind of high school exit test, or who take it just as a practice test. In response to changing conditions of this kind, technical improvements in the national center test are indispensable. At the same time, colleges using the national center test are called upon to consider how to use it effectively and to provide clarification and specific details of their admission policy.

　 Until recently, primary importance in the articulation process leading from high school to college has been attached to the educational function of the selection mechanism. However, in the present condition of Japanese higher education, finance is the first priority, and management is the first issue to be discussed, followed by education. How education can once again be made the top priority is the issue that must now be discussed.

　 Universities and colleges in Japan have experienced sweeping and sudden changes during the past ten years. Many constituent factors have contributed to the changes: the universalization of HE, the obligatory accreditation system, and so on. For example, an emphasis on “quality assurance” has hastened the reform of the curriculum program and its underlying pedagogy. Many universities and colleges are now putting stress on teaching and learning rather than research. More specifically, many Japanese universities have introduced a first-year experience program (FYE) to allow students to adjust smoothly to college life. This phenomenon accelerated after the late 1990s as Japan moved from the “massification” to the “post-massification” stage.

　 In this situation, almost all those students who want to enter university will be able to gain admission, implying that students who are less well prepared for university studies in terms of basic knowledge, study skills, and motivation, will enter higher education. In parallel with the move to post-massification, a lowering of the general academic level of university students will gradually become more noticeable. It is in this context that we should view the increase in the number of higher education institutions offering remedial courses and first-year seminars in their curriculum.

　 Against the above background, what is happening in Japanese higher education and what are the issues with which we have to deal in the framework of educational articulation between universities and high schools? The purposes of this paper are to discuss the arguments relating to articulation issues in the present post-massification era and then to examine realistic images of Japanese freshmen based on the Japanese Freshman Survey (JFS) conducted in 2009 and targeting more than 19,000 students. Secondly, after analyzing a comparative study of firstyear education in the U. S. and Japanese universities, this paper will show the differences between the two countries in terms of articulation issues and examine the future direction of Japanese educational articulation. In conclusion, the paper recommends developing the K-16 concept as a framework oriented toward the twin goals of learning outcomes and pedagogical issues.

　 This paper focuses on ‘localism’ as perceived by high school students. When people refer to “articulation from high school to college”, they usually intend to refer to the educational relationship between the two types of institution. However, when looking at articulation-related issues from the perspective of high school students, there is also the possibility that “localism”, specifically the problem of choosing where they will live after graduation, is an important issue.

　 In the first place, the author demonstrates through the use of interview data that the concept in the minds of many high school students is that of ‘small localism’, and he goes on to provide backup for the interview data findings by means of quantitative analyses. Finally, he uses a structural equation model to show that the effects of educational aspirations on localism are as strong as the effects of localism on educational aspirations.

　 On the basis of these findings, we can say that there is a possibility that universalization of higher education may bring about a change in young people’s perception of localism, and it is important to bear this possibility in mind.

　 The Japanese articulation process linking higher education with high school education has been supported in terms of its educational aspect by the national curriculum system. However, in terms of the selective aspect of the process, Japan lacks a common examination or test to evaluate the level of achievement of high school graduates. As a result, evaluation has depended on the entrance examinations set by each individual university. This is a very unusual situation compared to other industrialized countries.　 The above-mentioned degree of dependence on entrance examinations was the subject of criticism by scholars, high school teachers, and the media. In the face of these criticisms and extreme competition among applicants to enter universities in the late 1980s, then Japanese Ministry of Education implemented what was called the Third Education Reform, comprising 1) diversification of high schools, 2) the introduction of greater elasticity into the high school curriculum, and 3) diversification of entrance examinations. However, this led to an even deeper dependence of high schools on higher education entrance examinations in the context of trying to grasp the academic ability of students within the context of the educational articulation process.　 Accompanying the decrease in the 18-year old population since 1992, the ability of universities to select applicants has declined. The Japanese system of articulation has reached a turning point, and a new test to evaluate the level of general education in high school must be introduced.

　 One of the most serious problems of “educational articulation between high schools and universities” has to do with the declining academic level of university students and the subsequent demand for an assessment that can accurately identify the minimum level of academic achievement of students enrolled in a higher education institution. This paper discusses where the real problem lies in the field of the articulation, and attempts to identify ideal assessment tools to solve the problem, based on the results of two research projects conducted by Benesse Educational Research and Development Center that have not yet been released to the public.

　 In Europe, access to higher education has widened constantly in recent years. During this period, accompanying a review of the welfare state and the introduction of New Public Management policies, higher education has become increasingly characterized by marketization. However, higher education as such continues to be identified as a public good, and its provision still falls fundamentally within the area of responsibility of the state. In many countries, it is offered free or at low cost to participants.

　 This kind of public character of higher education has a great influence on the overall organization of relevant policies, and stress is put on ensuring equality and eliminating discrimination. Combined with free or quasi-free entry policies, many countries have adopted a system of assuring access to higher education for all students who successfully pass the high school leaving examination (open entry system). Recently, active policy measures that go beyond formal equality have been developed, putting emphasis on equity within the context of taking the circumstances of socially weak and vulnerable groups into consideration.

　 On the other hand, a significant number of universities have opposed demands by society or the government to broaden access, citing as reasons the declining quality of entrants, the difficulty of organizing courses for them and so on. However, recently, as can be seen in the EU’s Lisbon Strategy, higher education has become a policy target in the context of the knowledge economy, and the broadening of access to higher education has come to be seen as inevitable from the perspective of developing human resources that can contribute to economic development. It is against this background that targets for access rates or degree acquisition rates are being set in a not inconsiderable number of countries. It follows from this not only that universities are being asked to accept a much greater diversity of students than in the past, but also that assurance of their learning outcomes is being sought. The articulation process linking secondary education (high schools) and higher education (universities) is considered to be an important measure contributing to the achievement of these objectives.

　 This paper aims to rethink high school and college collaborative learning policies and practices at the secondary school level in Japan as compared to United States policies guiding objectives, approaches, and practices, in order to reconfigure the current system and achieve desirable policies and practices needed to meet the goals of higher education.

　 The current Japanese collaborative learning policy was introduced to bridge gaps between secondary school and college level education, and to fix the deteriorating norms and practices of general education at the secondary and college levels. Even though collaborative learning opportunities became widespread, improper policy configuration resulted in weak incentives for high school seniors who participated in such programs. Thus, trivial issues such as the means of recruiting college students and the interference of commercial businesses in such efforts, now surround higher education.

　 In the United States, high school and college collaborative learning policies and practices have included elitist, pragmatist, and civic approaches to respond to the objectives of higher education: cultivating human resources in a knowledgebased society, producing a highly skilled labor force, and forming social capital. Each approach is characterized by distinctive features in collaborative learning styles, the links and channels between higher and secondary education, and standardization or customization of the collaborative learning program. The elitist approach is characterized by cultivating gifted and talented individuals to become future leaders and innovators in a knowledge-based society. The pragmatist approach developed college learning preparatory programs, such as the Advanced Placement program. The civic approach provides a similar curriculum to the pragmatist approach, but with an additional general college preparatory program; however, this approach gives a more underrepresented population access to higher education to promote social development and justice.

　 Japan must reconfigure its policies on collaborative learning at the secondary level to obtain maximum results in social development. The educational system must be set up as an enterprise which integrates elementary, secondary, and higher education into a unified whole. Collaborative learning programs at the secondary level should be offered to address overlap of student proficiency, complementary content among educational areas must be taught, and concrete learning outcomes must be implemented.

　 The purpose of this paper is to clarify the recent situation concerning the relationship between higher education and upper secondary education in the three East Asian countries of Korea, Taiwan, and China. In these countries, higher education has diversified as a result of the rapid quantitative expansion and increasing autonomy of universities and colleges, and against this background, efforts have been made to mold the relationship between higher education and upper secondary education into a more appropriate form. Selecting one issue, the reform of the university admissions system, while the extent and direction are dissimilar in each of the three countries, there are some common trends. The first is that the national unified academic ability examination has been the subject of an ongoing review. The second is that the selection of applicants has come to be based not only on the score gained in the academic ability examination, but on various factors that have been introduced as part of the multi-dimensional modification of evaluation standards. The third is that the results of various activities carried out by the candidate concerned in upper secondary school have gradually come to be regarded as selection indicators. At the same time, some universities, even in the same country, can be seen to have each introduced different methods of selecting applicants. As every country seeks better articulation between higher education and upper secondary education, there is a need to keep a close and detailed watch on the progress of articulation reforms as they follow the path of increasing diversification.

　 The aim of this paper is to provide a comparative survey of the eight papers concerned with articulation in this special issue entitled “Articulation between Higher Education and Upper Secondary Education.” Specifically, the paper will identify the problems, examine the underlying reasons for them, and discuss the educational policies that have been employed to deal with them as they have occurred in recent years in Japan, Europe, the U.S., and East Asia.

　 The most important issue in the articulation process linking higher education and upper secondary education is the selection of students. I locate the selection systems (admission systems) within the societies constituting the quadrants of a matrix formed by two axes: criteria (academic ability or non-academic skills) and organizational environment (higher education or late secondary education).

　 As a result of the comparison, it can be clearly stated that in every society, student selection systems have not worked sufficiently well recently as a result of the increase in the rate of advancement to higher education, and that various selection systems based on multi-dimensional criteria have been introduced. In terms of the articulation agenda, educational policies targeted at the articulation process not only at the selection stage, but also within the educational curricula of higher education and upper secondary education.

　 Furthermore, in Europe or in the U.S. the problem of articulation between higher education and upper secondary education has been treated as a problem of social inequality in the context of equal opportunity in education. As a result, given the emergence of articulation in educational curricula as an issue, a new research area focusing on social inequality in learning outcomes has developed, and I suggest in this paper that consideration should be given to this new research topic.

　 The purpose of this research is to investigate the process of evaluation by teachers of the educational effect of teacher training in universities within their college experiences and the situation of the schools they are currently working.

　 With this purpose in mind, the concept of “educational effect” in this research is defined as follows. Firstly, educational effect as expressed in statistical terms is a concept based on evaluative recognition by teachers. Secondly, this study discusses the reality of educational effect as defined on the basis of teachers’ subjective judgment, mainly by using a questionnaire investigation. In addition to that, the results of an interview investigation are also analyzed. In short, the overall image of the evaluation of educational effect is shown by the results of the questionnaire investigation, while the specific circumstances of individual recognition are examined by means of the interview investigation.

　 As a result of the questionnaire investigation, it is clear that teachers’ college experiences and their present situation may function as factors regulating their evaluation of educational effect. Moreover, the results of the interview investigation show that, when teachers have occupational experiences which remind them of their college study, they recognize the relationship between their training studies in universities and their present jobs. In addition, it is suggested that teachers do not emphasize differences from their college courses in the context of their school-based experiences as a teacher.

　 Recently, the measurement of educational effect has become a huge issue for college assessment. As one of the methods of the measurement of educational effect by means of a graduate survey, this study suggests the necessity of describing the mechanism whereby educational effect is assessed by the individual perceptions of research participants shaped through their workplace context.

　 Recently in Japan, as universities and colleges have become expected to provide “quality assurance”, a question that has come up for discussion is that of what learning outcomes consist of and how they are to be evaluated.　 The central focus of this paper is on the skills and abilities, defined as “competencies” that students are expected to acquire irrespective of their disciplinary areas. Competencies, which are both cognitive and non-cognitive, are an indispensable requirement for the success of students in academic life, and can also be applied to self-development across a variety of jobs and life contexts.

　 At the preliminary research stage, three types of questionnaires aimed at evaluating competencies were set up: a self-evaluation sheet to be completed by a student, an evaluation sheet to be completed by a classmate of the student concerned, and an evaluation sheet to be completed by his/her teacher. For the second stage, analytically comparable evaluation sheets to be completed by a student and his/her teacher respectively were prepared and the relationship between them was analyzed.

　 The points on which the analysis was based are as follows: (1) comparison of the evaluation given by the student (self-evaluation) and his/her teacher, and in addition, comparison of the student’s self-evaluation and that of his/her classmate, (2) correlation of the differences between self-evaluation and evaluation by others with the area or scene of college life envisaged at the time when the evaluation was made.

　 The analysis yields the following two major results: (1) the rating point of each competency is subject to who (student or teacher) makes the evaluation and what scene he/she envisages when evaluating the competency, such as “classes within the formal curriculum”, “extracurricular activities”, and “companionship”, and (2) some competencies can be appropriately evaluated by means of a questionnaire, while others cannot.

　 Consequently, an examination of the method of evaluating competencies leads to the question about what kind of programs should be prepared to enable students to acquire all of them in the course of their Bachelor Degree course.

　 This paper clarifies the fact that variations in the financial behavior of private universities, primarily in the 1970s, are related to their asset size. From the second half of the 1960s to the first half of the 1970s, private universities, regardless of their size, borrowed funds mainly from commercial banks and up to the mid-1970s, short-term borrowings increased rapidly due to an increase in recurring expenses caused by inflation. Furthermore, in the case of long-term borrowings, owing partly to the fact that loans from The Promotion and Mutual Aid Corporation for Private Schools of Japan (a foundation) underwent a quantitative expansion, the relative proportion of foundation loans increased. However, as small universities did not have sufficient financial resources, it was presumed that they were investing in tangible fixed assets at the same time as incurring current liabilities in the form of short-term borrowings and notes payable.

　 Nevertheless, from the start of the second half of the 1970s, differences in the financial structure dependent on size became striking. While at small and mediumsized universities, the proportion of foundation loans showed a further rise, large universities, in the context of a favorable turnaround in financial conditions, promoted repayment of foundation loans and diversification of their financing while carefully observing changes in the trend in interest rates, and the proportion taken up by loans from commercial banks showed an increase. This indicates that a new form of market-oriented financing emerged at some large universities, even though it was still immature, from the 1960s, an era when universities had problems with the acquisition of long-term funds and short-term cash flow, to the second half of the 1970s.

　 In Japan, the number of universities confronting management crises is continuously increasing. This is caused primarily by the decline in the numbers of the 18-year-old cohort. Many universities have already begun to tackle this sociodemographic problem. However, identifying the management policy which is most appropriate and best suited to their individual circumstances is invariably a difficult issue. In fact, some universities have been unsuccessful in formulating and implementing countermeasures and have ended up in financial trouble.

　 The core aim of this paper is thus to propose a new approach to help universities find the most suitable and effective management policy. In order to achieve this, the procedure adopted is the following. Firstly, all universities (national, public and private) are ranked on the basis of the School Basic Survey data, Center of Excellence and Global COE data, and Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research data, and are then divided into 7 clusters. Secondly, by using an originally developed simulation model, which takes uncertainty factors into consideration, an estimate is made of the number of potential applicants for the next 100 years, and of how much time each university cluster has before the advent of the era of free college admissions. Thirdly, management policies which can be implemented during the grace period are carefully selected and assigned to each cluster.

　 In conclusion, the findings are: 1) universities that belong to the 6^th and 7^th clusters are likely to experience free admissions within a few years; 2) universities that belong to the 4^th cluster are at a critical point, so they must make a rapid decision about what kind of management policy is best suited to their circumstances; while 3) universities that belong to the 1^st and 2^nd clusters are in a very secure position for the next several decades. Based on these findings, the paper proposes a number of approaches to the problem of how to tackle university management issues in conditions of uncertainty.

　 This study aims to make a qualitative analysis of the promotion process of administrative staff to middle management level in Japanese higher education institutions. The main research question to be analyzed is whether learning from experience is as important in the promotion process in higher education institutions as previous studies have shown it to be in private companies. The main findings are as follows.

　 Firstly, learning from experience is more important than classroom-style training for administrative staff who are in line for managerial positions. Secondly, the scarcity of qualified managers who are able to design appropriate tasks for junior staff so as to improve their preparedness for management positions is a serious issue. Thirdly, the adoption of customer-oriented behavior by staff and the establishment of a personnel system to support them are crucial elements in protecting and enlarging the status of qualified managers. And fourthly, characteristic learning content in the workplace of university administrative staff comprises learning about internal structures and means getting a grasp of the needs of other sections, including the academic faculty, and taking forward optimal operational methods designed to maximize client satisfaction in the institution.

　 This paper is concerned with an analytical study on the results of a questionnaire survey that was designed to clarify from an international standpoint the extent to which the GPA index has been adopted as a part of university grade assessment systems and how GPA systems are being operated. The questionnaire was initially mailed in 2009 to 1000 universities, and responses were received from 311 universities in 33 countries. The main results, as received from universities in the U.S., Europe, Asia and Australia, are as follows. Firstly, there are clearly major regional differences in the way in which GPA systems are operated. In the U.S., all of the respondents (n=165) were operating GPA systems. In Asia (n=44. not including Japanese universities), the ratio of universities operating a GPA system was 90.9 percent. These figures put the U.S. and the main Asian nations, with the exception of Japan, in the lead in terms of adopting GPA systems. In contrast, GPA has achieved low penetration in European universities (n=88), with only 21.6 percent having a GPA system. This may be because the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS) is serving as a platform for grade assessment. The small response sample from Australian universities ― only 12 ― means that the results lack stability. However, given that reservation, 41.7 percent of respondents were using GPA systems. Where universities are operating GPA systems, how do they handle the relationship between letter grades and grade points (GPs)? In the U.S., more than half of the respondent universities (57 percent) used scales of 10 grades or more. Around 30 percent of universities had scales of around five grades similar to those used at most Japanese universities. It has become common in the U.S. to set 4.0 as the maximum attainable GPs, but this could hardly be called accepted international practice. The calculation principle underlying the GPA system approach whereby course hours are included in the assessment appears to be an accepted international practice, adopted by those universities operating GPA systems. There were clear regional differences in terms of whether or not universities have relational rules about the scope of conversion from letter grades to percentage equivalent values (maximum of 100 points or percent). Around 12 percent of U.S. universities have such rules, compared to 26 percent in Europe, 60 percent in Australia and 68 percent in Asia. This would suggest that using the raw score as an assessment score in a maximum 100-point scale is an Asian characteristic.