Making and constraining a higher education market in postwar Japan

It is widely known that the role of private funding and private institutions varies greatly across higher education systems. Recent comparative studies of the politics of higher education funding have illuminated some of the history of this variance and provided valuable cross-case theorising about the determinants of observed differences. Less attention has been given to the politics of actual higher education supply, in contrast to institutions’ political demands for public funding. Under what conditions have states constrained, condoned or promoted entrepreneurship, either of a non-profit or for-profit kind, in higher education supply? The Japanese case is notable for the relative prominence of private funding and provision in a constrained market model. This brought rapid expansion through a striking level of higher education entrepreneurship at certain historical junctures; and then exaggerated stability in recent decades through continuing state controls upon market forces. This paper explores then the historical and contemporary politics of the making and constraining of Japan’s higher education market, within the context of Japan’s own particular postwar ‘variety of capitalism’ and the forces for change acting upon it. The paper first outlines the influential ideational and institutional legacies from the initial establishment of Japan’s formal higher education system in the late 19th century. From the outset Japan had dual drivers of institutional establishment and expansion: state initiative to promote elite research-oriented public universities, serving both national strategic objectives and offering a merit-baed pathway to individual social advancement, and private institutions that met, with state endorsement, growing public demand for higher education. Private entrepreneurship in higher education had both pre-modern domestic antecedents and clear models and legacies from institutional initiatives by Western missionaries from the early modern Meiji period on. Now venerable and elite private universities arose from the foundational endeavours of a range of both domestic and foreign actors pursuing diverse religious and philosophical motivations; yet state controls would also be a force for increasing operational uniformity over time. The paper then examines the postwar political economy of the rapid expansion of Japan’s higher education system, in which an increasing proportion of capacity would be delivered through private provision. Regional and local governments also played larger roles in both direct provision and catalysing state support for local private educational entrepreneurship. The paper then explores how this established political economy of vested private and public interests evolved, from the late 1990s, from being a liberal market growth-oriented one to a market-constraining dynamic, as increasingly severe domestic demographic and economic conditions made downscaling in aggregate across Japan’s higher education system the most likely scenario. Japan’s higher education system reveals the role of ideational constraints and the conditions under which they are contested effectively, institutional path dependency, and, starkly, the political and economic contingency of marketisation.