[shm224]

According to the same survey by Times Higher Education, Harvard is #6 in US! So why is Harvard in such decline? /s

As soon as their economy picks up, I bet that THE and others would start praising the virtues of the Japanese education system again, regardless of any changes (or no change) in education.

[Animats]

As soon as their economy picks up...

Japan had their real estate and stock market bubble in 1990. The Nikkei index reached nearly 40,000. People in Japan speculated that Japan would pass the US in GDP in a few years.

Then came the long crash.[1] The Nikkei index dropped all the way to 7000 by 2003. Then it recovered some, but crashed again in 2008. There's been considerable recovery since; it's now around 20,000. But that's still half of the peak.

(The US market is back above its all-time peak before the 2008 crash. It's probably overinflated, but not as badly as before 2008.)

Japan was the first country to hit the "postindustrial wall", or "what are all these people going to do"? I'd hoped they'd come up with a solution the US could copy. But the best Japan has been able to come up with is heavy spending on infrastructure to keep people busy.

[1] http://finance.yahoo.com/chart/%5En225?ltr=1#eyJtdWx0aUNvbG9...

[stale2002]

The problem of Japan is caused specifically because of its make work culture.

Jobs are focused on shoe face, NOT on producing value.

What matters is not how good you are it is how many years you have put into the company working 80 hour weeks.

It is unsurprising to me that a culture not focused on producing value wouldn't produce much value.

[sbierwagen]

Shoe face?

[Brockenstein]

You know, shoe face, the classic make work gambit where you employ people to makes shoes with their faces because it's inefficient you have to employ a lot of people to have any sort of production. It's pretty common in the East.

[csa]

This is unlikely. Japan has some legit research facilities and actually quite good academic resources. The problem is that the professors/researchers are heavily leaning towards small wins that get published locally rather than research that would get attention abroad.

The people I knew did this in order to improve their job security and/or job prospects. Basically, having a long list of largely meaningless publications was better received by tenure and hiring committees than making fewer but more substantive contributions. To use a baseball metaphor, they value through their actions the singles hitters more than the doubles or home run hitters.

The government is trying to encourage people to take more risks, but for most of the academics, it just doesn't make sense. The reward for good international-grade research is essentially zero, but the cost of going bust (e.g., a big project without strong publication outcomes) is perceived as being high (although I'm not sure it actually is).

Furthermore, the very best researchers are going to the US and Europe. Research labs there value their Japanese peers more than Japanese labs do in terms of both money and research prestige.

[hkmurakami]

I've heard that one of the contributing factors is that the domestic academic publication industry is big and strong enough that careers can be supported while never publishing internationally. Many countries' academics have no choice but to publish internationally.

Analogous to how a strong domestic economy has impeded a need for better English education and international business skills.

[csa]

The domestic Japanese publication industry certainly does carry enough weight to build a career as a professor on. The question is whether is actually should.

Many of the journals are essentially pay to play -- join an organization, present at the conference, write a paper for the proceedings that is not completely absurd (slight absurdity is ok), ship $100, and you will get published.

There are journals that are more rigorous, and getting into these at last once is often a key to better employment, but these are the exceptions rather than the rule. Furthermore, I would say that most of the work published in the competitive domestic Japan journals would not be publishable abroad both due to limited impact as well as (in some fields) questionable methodology.

As a simple example of the low quality that I found in some journals, many academics were unable to interpret standard t-tests correctly in their evaluation of their research. It brought a tear to my eye.

[hkmurakami]

Appreciate the insider insight!