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Hideo Ishida: Keio Business School, Keio University, Japan
The MBA in Japan
One characteristic of education in Japan, relative to other advanced economies, is the higher proportion of students going on to undergraduate courses on the one hand and the lower rate of those graduates going on to postgraduate education on the other. The same can be said about the field of business education, where professional education at the postgraduate level remains quite poorly developed, and is far behind the other advanced economies and even some developing countries. The Graduate School of Business Administration at Keio University has been in the vanguard of professional management education in Japan. Ironically someone expressed a view not long ago that the proliferation of business schools in the US could have been the cause of the recent decline of the American economy. Some management scholars also noted at the time that business schools in West Germany and Japan remain underdeveloped despite the economies of those countries showing excellent performance.
Even so, the Japanese Government has decided recently on a policy for expanding graduate schools, while introducing flexibility to the existing higher education system which have been quite rigid. In response, the major universities began putting more resources into professional education at the postgraduate level. The graduate schools, until now institutes for nurturing future scholars and academic researchers, have taken on the task of developing practitioners and re-educating adults.
In 1989, the number of graduate schools in which a system of "special selection for the adult" was in operation was only 23. By 1992 the number had increased to 151[1]. The majority are in science and engineering, but notably the Graduate Schools of Law at Tokyo University and Kyoto University, with its high reputation in social sciences, also operate a special provision for adults. In the field of management education, courses for adults have been established at Tsukuba University, the International University of Japan, Kobe University, Aoyama Gakuin University and Hosei University, among others. The International University of Japan and Keio University have only full-time postgraduate business education courses. The graduate schools in the other universities have both full-time and part-time (evening and weekend) courses, but in those institutions which have launched the postgraduate school in management education with both...