Japan, Higher Education in

The formation of Japan’s modern higher education is modeled on Western ideas, but Japan has formed its own characteristics of higher education and even exported its model of higher education to other Asian countries in the first half of the 20th century. Since the early 1990s, tremendous changes have occurred in Japan’s higher education, and the government has implemented several national policies of building up a new higher education system for the future. This entry presents a brief history of higher education in Japan and then discusses characteristics of higher education institutions and national policies affecting changes in Japan’s higher education since the early 1990s.