[ajeet_dhaliwal]

How would you measure if it has merit? No one can know for sure if the report has merit, it's their opinion based on their metrics and what they consider to be important properties to measure, like I said it's not an exact science.

[azinman2]

I don't know anything about the report, but one would hope that these metrics are published and have some verifiability. One could create empirical metrics based on research output, monetization, patents, keynote speeches, citation counts, etc. It doesn't have to be so fuzzy.

My point is not to be knee-jerk about the nationality source, but rather look at the claims and evaluate them. If they previously ranked Tokyo University so highly -- should we throw that out too?

[icantdrive55]

"One could create empirical metrics based on research output, monetization, patents, keynote speeches, citation counts, etc. It doesn't have to be so fuzzy."

Would it really help the average student? I went to Berkley for a semester, and in some courses we watched the professor on video. He literally phoned it in.

I actually had a better learning experience at my local community college.

This is just my subjective experience.

I have known too many people who literally drank/hallucinated their way through an Ivy League school. They graduate, and don't tell anyone the truth about their fancy college learning experience. There's no test at the end to correlate into an empirical metric. It's just, "I graduated from this UC, or Whatever!".

I would like to see every school that accepts federal/state tax money give their students a standardized test, and future funding would be based on the collective students score. It would have to be a fair balanced test. Instead of I graduated from MIT; it would be I graduated with a 95%.

It might level out the playing field? It would prevent networking--maybe? It would prevent having to "kiss ass"? It would prevent me from throwing up in my mouth when a new Princeton graduate puts on the horned rimmed glasses shortly after graduation, and just expects respect.

[omginternets]

Indeed, postmodernism is not a science at all.

Test of us non-postmodernists value an education system capable of producing competent elites, who in turn produce value for society (measure that how you like). By that measure, it's pretty apparent that Japan's universities are doing poorly.

And the Japanese agree with this, in case you missed it. Please stop with this nauseating pedantry.

[gydfi]

Japan is going pretty well last I checked. It's one of the few places that is successfully transitioning to a lower birth rate via population shrinkage rather than mass immigration, enabling them to maintain their own culture and people.

[csa]

Serious question... do you or have you recently lived in Japan?

Japanese people don't think things are going so well.

Many knowledgeable non-Japanese don't think that things are going so well.

My personal take is that Japan is taking a huge gamble by taking on a massive amount of debt relative to their GDP. The piper will need to be paid at some point.

John Mauldin had described the Japanese economy as a bug in search of a windshield. Based on what my Japanese friends in the financial sector say, they agree. Everyone is just crossing their fingers now and hoping that something... anything... happens to force a redirect. No one is quite sure what this will look like (I personally think yen will take a big hit, but that's just a guess).

[rangibaby]

I have lived in Japan since I was a teenager and people have been predicting an economic collapse leading to the end of Japan since before then.

Not saying that you're wrong but it's not the first time I have read that comment.

[csa]

Agreed. This demise had been predicted for a LONG time.

Trying to time a short has always been a fool's game. I don't think it's different this time.

That said, I don't see any reason on the ground to be optimistic at all.

[konceptz]

I've been told that the olympics in 2020 is one such possible happening.

[thaumasiotes]

Well, for a very unintuitive value of "maintain their own people". A low birth rate has pretty direct effects on that.

[hx87]

And why should we discount an opinion just because the source is from outside the country? Internal biases are every bit as severe as outside biases.