The purpose of this paper is to examine who enters senmon gakko (Japanese vocational schools), how they use this education, and how this usage has changed over time.
The senmon gakko has not been fully explored as an object of academic concern, since it possesses an amorphous nature derived from the separation of its legal position (as an institution of post-secondary education) and its practical position (as an institution of higher education).
Preceding studies have made conflicting arguments regarding what kind of high school students enter senmon gakko. There have been two different positions. The first is the higher educational model, which sees the senmon gakko as an institution of higher education and presumes that the entrants belong to a similar stratum as their counterparts in university or junior college. The second is the post-secondary educational mode l, which regards the senmon gakko as an institution of post-secondary education and underlines its uniqueness.
Today, the senmon gakko is often discussed in educational policies and academic discussions as if it were one of the institutions of higher education. Historically, however, senmon gakko were set up as less prestigious institutions of post-secondary education, beginning in 1976, and were long disparaged because of this.
In other words, the position of the senmon gakko has changed from post-secondary education to higher education, and this change is emphasized in this paper. Some indices indicate that the turning point took place in 1990.
In consideration of this, the author established the hypothesis that the change in the position of the senmon gakko reflects alterations in the students. This hypothesis is examined by applying a multinomial logistic regression analysis and other methods to the JGSS data set. The results suggest that the hypothesis is adopted.
Until the 1990s, the senmon gakko was the unique route for high school graduates from the self-employed and similar strata to attain blue-collar or lower-level white-collar jobs as an initial career. So it can be said that the senmon gakko provided a relatively profitable path.
Since the 1990s, however, with the increase in students from the lower white-collar class, senmon gakko students have become similar to university students in terms of social class. Now they are clearly different from high school graduates in their origins. However, from a comparison of entrance (family background and school records) with exit (initial jobs), the senmon gakko provides a smaller pay-out than it did before the 1990s.
These findings demonstrate that the change in the users and usages of senmon gakko show a process through which post-secondary education is reorganized into higher education.
The Japanese General Social Surveys (JGSS) are designed and carried out at the Institute of Regional Studies at Osaka University of Commerce in collaboration with the Institute of Social Science at the University of Tokyo under the direction of Ichiro TANIOKA, Michio NITTA, Hiroki SATO and Noriko IWAI with Project Manager Minae OSAWA. The project is financially assisted by a Gakujutsu Frontier Grant from the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology for the 1999-2003 academic years, and the data sets are compiled and distributed by the SSJ Data Archive, Information Center for Social Science Research on Japan, Institute of Social Science, the University of Tokyo.
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