How the japanese learn to work 2nd edition - part 3

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Who goes where? 25 useful supplement to their pensions. The test marks were standardized on the whole 14-year-old population of the prefecture in a generally understood fashion—10 marks above or below 50 for each standard deviation—so that only 5 per cent came above 70 or below 30. Since children’s effort input tended to be fairly uniform, there was a relative stability in each child’s scores—his or her hensachi range, or range of ‘standard deviation scores’, tended to be relatively narrow. Since the success of last year’s pupils with hensachi rating x getting into high school y was carefully documented by the teachers—the scores provided a good basis for advising pupils on which choice of high school to make. So much was this process the focus of parental and teacher concern that ‘hensachi education’ became the boo-word par excellence, summing up all that was stifling, uncreative and anti-educational in the school system. The growth of such criticism led, in the early 1990s, to a ban on the use of such commercial tests in schools. According to the teachers of the middle school senior classes, who used pupils’ records on such tests to advise them as to which high school they should apply to, this has simply added to their work. They still have to give advice; that advice still has to be given on the basis of children’s prospective performance, relative to other children, in the high schools’ competitive entrance examinations. The only difference is that now they have to make up mock tests themselves, which means extra work but no extra pay (although one suspects that the money which used to be spent on buying the commercial tests is somehow channelled into teachers’ allowances). Increasingly, they are devising tests collectively—all the schools in a town or wider area getting together—and in at least ten prefectures this is already organized on a prefectural basis by the local education authorities. (The prefectures have formal jurisdiction and budget for (public) high schools. Primary and junior secondary schools are administered by the municipal/ rural district tier of government.) The only difference is a cosmetic one; only raw scores on the tests are used; normalization and the calculation of a ‘standard deviation score’ are studiously avoided. So who can call it ‘hensachi education’ now? And meanwhile, of course, an estimated 50 per cent of third-year middle school students—the 50 per cent who, or the parents of whom, are most concerned about which high school they get to—are going to private after- school juku where they still take the commercial tests, and still have their standard deviation scores measured. It is highly unlikely that they refrain from reporting these scores to their class teachers when the decision about which high school they should seek to enter is being made. The actual operation of the examination and selection system shows considerable local variety; in some prefectures with large school districts— a single catchment pool for eight or more schools, say—all the middle school
26 How the Japanes learn to work teachers in charge of final year classes spend a horse-trading weekend where, in the light of the range of scores of their charges they hammer out quotas, first of all for the top school, in such a way as to equalize the scores of the marginal lowest-scoring pupil from each school. Then they do the same for the second-best school, and so on down the line. Over the next weeks they advise their pupils and their pupils’ parents accordingly. An alternative is to allow initial tentative applications, then for each high school to publish statistics of applicant numbers, thus allowing the weaker candidates to be withdrawn from over-subscribed schools, before definitive applications are sent in. How this works in practice in a rural area with a relatively low rate of progression to university may be illustrated by the situation in Iwaki city in Fukushima prefecture, which is the subject of Table 2.3. The details of the following description relate to the mid–1980s, but there is no evidence that the general picture has subsequently changed, except that the passage of the second baby-boom—22 per cent fewer middle school pupils in 1994 compared with the mid–1980s peak, has left some of the lowest-ranking schools short of pupils. The city constitutes a bigger-than-average catchment area, where the ranking of high schools is unambiguous. At what one might call Level 1, there is a single top public school for boys and one for girls which between them take about 17 per cent of the age group. (Some of the northern prefectures—unlike any in central and western Japan—still partially hold out against co-education.) These two schools owe their pre-eminence to the fact that they were the only pre-war selective secondary schools in the district. Almost all of the boys and the majority of the girls who attend them go on subsequently to college or university. At Level 2, there is a third general academic-course high school which takes both boys and girls and from which about a third of the leavers seek to, and manage to, get into (lesser) universities. Also on Level 2 are two of the vocational schools—an industrial technical school which takes predominantly boys, and a commercial vocational school which takes predominantly girls. They rank as of approximately equal prestige with the general-course high school just mentioned, and are in fact slightly more difficult to get into—in the case of the Data Processing Course at the technical school, much more difficult. A third technical school in another part of the district has a slightly lower entrance level. Then, at Level 3 come three general high schools which divide up the next slice of the age group (roughly from the 50th to the 80th percentile
of the ability range) primarily on geographical lines, and below them—Level 4—two general schools which try to fill their places by a ‘second round recruitment’ — scooping up those who failed to get into their first-choice school higher up the pecking order. Finally, at the bottom of the public school heap are two vocational schools—one for agriculture and one for fisheries. There are no elite university-preparatory private schools within commuting distance of this area—a major difference from the situation in areas where (at a rough guess) some 80 per cent of the population lives. There are just two private high schools. They take children who cannot get into any public high school even at the second-round recruitment, or children who could get into a low-ranking public school, but whose parents would prefer them to be educated with the children of other parents who can afford private school
Who goes where? 29 fees. This syndrome is stronger in the case of girls—what they learn is less important for their life chances/marriage chances than who they learn it with. The girls’ private school, in consequence, may have pupils who could have got into Level 3 schools. The only further complication: there is one school with all-prefecture recruitment—the five-year College of Technology—in the prefectural capital at some considerable distance and hence for boarders only as far as Iwaki is concerned. The small number of Iwaki pupils who go there would have had a good chance (in the case of those entering the machinery and construction courses) or an almost certain chance (in the case of those entering the more popular electricity or applied chemistry courses) of getting into the Level 1 high schools. But they are unlikely to be in that top five per cent of scorers whose teachers would tell them they had a good chance of going on from high school to a good national university. It is obvious that it makes little sense to compare the average abilities of general-course students and vocational-course students: some general courses take the brightest, some the least bright children. One might summarize Iwaki’s ability-distribution system as follows: For a child diagnosed as being in the top 10 per cent of the ability distribution, it will be difficult to resist the pressure of teachers’ urgings that ‘of course’ they should go to one of the top high schools and on to university—unless something in their connections or back-ground makes the College of Technology alternative more attractive. (The ‘ability labelling effect’ makes the top schools attractive even for those who might not be able to afford to go to a university.) For pupils who fall in the 10th to the 20th percentile, there is a choice between: — Aiming at the top school, and being prepared to take a year in a cramming school in order to get in at a second attempt. — For those who cannot afford that, aiming at the top school and risking relegation to Level 3 or 4 if the bid fails. — Aiming at one of the Level 2 schools—the general school or one of the 3 vocational schools—with near certainty of success.
30 How the Japanes learn to work For those who fall in the 20th to the 50th percentile range (a rather narrow range in performance terms) application to a top school is a big risk. They are naturals for the Level 2 schools and provide the bulk of the entrants to the vocational schools. As to what determines choice as between general and vocational courses in this ability range, there are few careful studies, it being, apparently, very difficult for Japanese educational sociologists to do any work correlating performance with social class characteristics except at the broadest ecological level. (See e.g. Hata 1975–6.) Clearly important are: sex (it is more important for boys to go to university, but, on the other hand, general courses have higher general prestige and so are better for ladylike marriageability); the family’s economic circumstances (keeping a child in a Tokyo university can cost well over half of the average Iwaki family’s income); the general level of social aspiration—white collar families are more likely to make sacrifices to push a moderately bright child into the university-going bracket, blue collar families to think that their child might as well learn something useful; and parental occupation—families with small businesses want their eldest sons to learn something of use to the business, private doctors’ and dentists’ sons aspire to enter father’s profession. In a metropolitan prefecture like Tokyo where social aspiration levels are higher and universities more cheaply accessible to those who can commute from home, a much higher proportion of the high school population is bent on taking a general course and keeping open their options for university entry. Hence the vocational school students come from lower down the ability range, as Table 2.4 shows. The ‘image’ of the vocational high schools is less favourable, and employers’ eagerness to recruit from them is diminished— quite apart from any doubts they might harbour about the usefulness of what is taught in such schools or the quality of their teaching—doubts which might apply equally in Iwaki as in Tokyo. UNIVERSITY ENTRY Vocational courses at the university do not suffer so obviously from any ‘ability-labelling’ problem, and the extent to which the ‘academic bias problem’ is evident is limited. Japan has no Oxfords and no Cambridges. Its elite universities have never been places where reverend clerks prepared young gentlemen for a life of, hopefully cultured, indolence, or nobility-obliged public service. They started off—just at the
Who goes where? 31 time when the feudal aristocracy was being pensioned off and winkled out of its land rights—as meritocratic as the grandes écoles, and they were built for a country which took industrialization, and especially manufacturing, seriously. The cultural break with the past which the political upheaval of the 1860s and 1870s brought, immeasurably weakened Confucian notions about gentlemen keeping out of kitchens. Engineering as well as science was an integral part of the first university foundations. As between arts stream and science stream, therefore, there is, overall, no great difference either in prestige, or in material prospects, though it seems to be still the case that the law department of Tokyo University, established as the meritocratic route into the governing class in the 1880s before there were many scientists in Japan (nor politicians of any consequence to dilute the bureaucrats’ power to govern) produces a higher proportion of the directors of major manufacturing companies than the same university’s science and engineering faculties. And in MITI the top universities’ science graduates are more likely to be recruited as technologists than as generalists with, consequently, lesser chances of reaching the top. But that is a special case, and in general, children who are good at maths will have to be quite single-minded to resist the assumption of teachers and parents that, of course, they should try to get a university science place.
32 How the Japanes learn to work Anyone trying for a place at a national university does not have to make a definite choice of stream until he writes out his entrance application forms: the first-hurdle national examination is in the five main subjects—maths, science, social studies (history and geography), Japanese and English—for all applicants. For the private universities, entrance requirements are more diverse, and there has been more experimentation with admission by high school record only. Some also require that applicants take the same first- hurdle national examination; others have only their own examination. Most of these require only three subjects (excluding either science and maths or social studies and Japanese), so in the private high schools where pupils are more likely to be able to afford the higher fees of the private universities, there has generally been some specialization from the age of 16 or 17 since the introduction of the broader national examination for the national universities in 1979. Enough bright students have opted for these more concentrated courses leading to the private universities to have had a noticeable effect on the (hensachi-measured) ability levels of entrance cohorts at Keio and Waseda, the two leading private universities, thus raising their prestige, increasing the numbers choosing that route and hence the intensity of competition, thus further raising ability levels, etc. Such is the respect for the Ministry-ordained curriculum guidelines, however, that even the more concentrated courses do not drop the non-central subjects entirely, so that a change of stream is not too difficult at the age of 18. The hensachi system permits some objective measure of the attractiveness of different subjects and their consequent ability to recruit able students. The advertising literature of the cram schools (which are attended by ronin students making a second or third attempt at entrance exams as well as by current high school students) rate each university department by the hensachi score which should guarantee an 80 per cent chance of success in its entrance examination. (The figures are produced by analysing the ‘average mock test scores’ of the previous year’s applicants and the difference in scores between those who passed and those who failed each department’s entrance examination. The banning of the commercial tests mentioned earlier has applied to public high schools, too, but has had even less effect on practice than in middle schools since a much higher proportion of would-be university students go to juku, and a high proportion are in private, not public, high schools anyway.) From these figures it seems, if one takes the top university, Tokyo, that entrance scores for the Law/Political Science Faculty and for the
Who goes where? 33 Science and Engineering Faculty are about equal, and both several points below the Medical Faculty. (The intense competition to enter all medical schools—in some of the less savoury reaches of the private university system, competition in parental donations to the Building Fund as well as in marks— is a reflection of the high incomes which doctors enjoy in Japan.) Table 2.5 uses these ratings—as given by the brochure of one cram school chain—to compare the national distribution by ability rankings of pupils in economics on the one hand, and of various branches of science and engineering on the other. It makes the point that the latter are on average brighter, but in both subjects the dispersal is wide. There are a good number of students graduating from private provincial engineering colleges whose academic achievement levels are not much above average for the whole ability range, and well below average for the university-going group. They are likely to be recruited by local small building firms and manufacturing companies for careers which would look more like technicians’ careers in Britain. Likewise, or even more so, the lesser-university economists. Within science and engineering there is certainly evidence of the ‘academic bias’. But again it gets intermixed with the ‘ability labelling effect’. Where physics is established as the prestige subject par excellence—as it was made in Japan by the nation’s first two Nobel prizes—then that is where the cream of the cream go. And getting into physics then becomes the only way of publicly demonstrating that you are the cream of the cream. Again there are objective indicators of differential values, albeit at the local level. Tokyo University recruits all its science and engineering students through two entrance examinations, one for the physical and one for the biological sciences. Specialization starts at the beginning of the third year, and students are allocated to their first-choice department according to their marks in the first two years’ courses. Physics is, indeed, the elite department which it is most difficult to get into, and it is some of the less prestigious engineering departments like civil engineering which scoop up the left-overs. But equally, some of the engineering departments—aeronautical engineering, for example—are near the top of the tree. And that is, after all, an elite university pattern—the pattern at a university whose graduates can expect, if they survive among the quarter of the intake who are admitted to the PhD course, to have no difficulty in pursuing an academic career—albeit as teachers at a provincial university. At universities further down the ability/prestige
36 How the Japanes learn to work ladder—even among the less than a dozen universities to which PhD courses are confined—this attraction of the academic, pure-science stream is less evident. As will be seen from the overall distribution pattern shown in Table 2.5, although science and maths students do have better academic records than engineering students, the difference is not very great. It is also relevant that the science graduates of lesser universities and those who do not make it into the graduate courses of the elite universities, have little hesitation in going into industry after they graduate. The tendency noted in other countries for finance houses, merchant banks and stock-broking companies to snap up the best and the brightest of them was almost unknown in Japan until 1987 when the internationalization of finance and the euphoria of five years of bull markets finally produced yuppie-level salary offers from the securities companies, and the newspaper leader writers began to deplore the corruption of hitherto healthy Japanese capitalism. Are those they asked, who make money finally going to have higher prestige than those who make products? Is Japan finally treading the primrose path that led to Britain’s decline? A newspaper columnist joining in the general attack on the banks who were demanding public funds to bail the banking system out of its bad debts crisis, suggested that before they asked for public funds they should make amends for past errors. First they should sell all the art works they bought at inflated prices during the bubble, and second they should send all the scientists and engineers they hired during the bubble into manufacturing industry where properly they belong. Higuchi has done some interesting calculations which demonstrate not only the change in the industry-destinations of graduates overall, but how the shift applies differentially to the high achievers and the low achievers (Higuchi 1992:154). The HA/LA—high achiever/low achiever—co-efficient of Table 2.6 is calculated from Higuchi’s figures. Divide all the graduates of one year into three groups, those from universities which required on entrance a hensachi of over 60 (one standard deviation above average), those where the entrance cut-off was below 50, and those in between. The percentage of the first group who entered a particular industry, divided by the percentage of the second group entering the same industry is that industry’s HA/LA co- efficient for that year. Although 1975 was a recession year and 1990 a boom year, figures for intermediate years suggest that the difference between these two years is more a matter of secular than of cyclical change. It will be apparent that the machine industries are gaining in ‘quality’ at the expense of steel and textiles, and so, also, are ‘transport and utilities’ —
Who goes where? 37 probably thanks largely to telecommunications. The other big gainer is, indeed, finance and insurance. LIFETIME EARNINGS It may seem strange, to those used to orthodox analysis by economists of the rates of return on investment in a university degree, that Japanese youth should be so preoccupied with climbing the educational ladder when, as Table 2.7 shows, the lifetime earnings of university graduates are not so superior to those of high school graduates. The differential has always been small—smaller, probably, than in any other country. According to Higuchi’s calculations (1992:151), using the same source as Table 2.7, the differential in totalled life-time earnings almost disappears—it narrows to less than five percentage points—if one takes account of the number of years of earning and, using a 10 per cent discount rate, calculates the present value at age 16. His figures show that even on a discounted present value basis, differentials were greater in the 1960s, but from 1975 to his latest date of 1989 they remained stable.
38 How the Japanes learn to work The figures of Table 2.7 suggest a long-term trend for the graduate premium to increase at the early ages and decline after the mid-thirties. The former may perhaps be ascribed to automation and the generally diminishing importance of shop-floor workers, lowering the incentives for firms to try to attract good high school graduates with attractive starting wages. The latter may be explained by the diminishing ‘quality’ of university graduates as the proportion of the age group entering university has greatly expanded. University graduates had much stronger claims to be an intellectual elite in the 1950s when the older cohorts of the 1976 column in Table 2.7 were being educated. There does seem, however, to have been some acceleration of the decline in the graduate premium for ages over 45. This is probably the effect of what the Japanese call the dankai no sedai phenomenon—the ‘lump generation’ of management-track recruits hired during the high-growth period in expectation of continuous expansion which did not happen. It is plausible to suppose that they have been more subject to taps on the shoulder inducing them to take voluntary early retirement than high school graduates, and re- employment is almost always at a lower salary. Also, in many firms among those badly hit by the recession, managers have been induced to accept exemplary—usually temporary—salary cuts to justify belt-tightening salary freezes for union members, though whether that was sufficiently common to be observable in the statistics is hard to judge. Whatever the explanation, the fact is that calculations of the overall graduate premium such as are contained in Table 2.7 are not often made, nor generally discussed. And a major reason for that is that, even if 18-year-olds
Who goes where? 39 did make rational rate-of-return calculations as the human-capital theorists tell them they should (or tell them that they do), how much the average lifetime earnings of university graduates exceed those of high school graduates would hardly enter into their choice of whether to go to a university or not. What counts, everyone assumes, is which high school and which university. This has been true for a long time: the first record of institutionalized salary differentials dates from 1917, when NYK, the shipping line, offered starting salaries for graduates of Tokyo Imperial University of ¥40 a month, the graduates of the two leading private universities, Keio and Waseda, ¥30, and of lesser universities, ¥25 (Amano 1996:194). Postwar egalitarianism forebade such overt discrimination, but which university one graduated from became an enormously important determinant of whether one got into firms like NYK in the first place. Internal career-track distinctions among graduates of different ‘ranks’ of universities have recently been revived in many large firms. ‘Headquarters recruitment’ is for the high flyers who are likely to be posted to any part of the firm or its subsidiaries, and who are eventual candidates for the top jobs; ‘local recruitment’ for those whose academic record suggests that they are never likely to make senior management anyway. In the mid–1990s one of the banks introduced a third, intermediate career track for graduates. Table 2.6, showing very different HA/LA co-efficients between graduates in services or construction where pay is relatively low, and those in finance and insurance where it is high, is one aggregated indication of the way these mechanisms work. So are the firm-size differentials shown in Table 2.8. The importance of the latter is clear from another study which found that in 1987, of men and women graduating from universities at the bottom end of the hierarchy—those where the entrance-level hensachi was rated at less than 45—only 7 per cent
40 How the Japanes learn to work entered firms with more than 5,000 employees, whereas of those coming from universities where the entrance rating was over 70, 70 per cent did so (Takeuchi 1989). The wage differentials shown in Table 2.8 apply to graduates as much as to other workers. The same source as Table 2.7 shows by how much the wages and bonuses of university graduates in manufacturing firms of more than 1,000 employees are greater than those of university graduates in firms with 10–99 employees—11 per cent greater for 25–29 year-olds, 34 per cent for those in their late thirties and 66 per cent greater for those aged 50–54 (1994 figures). The likelihood is, in other words, that any compression of the difference between high school leavers’ and university graduates’ wages is a function of changing inter-sectoral or inter-firm differentials and not a sign of an overall shift to greater equality of income distribution. The Gini co-efficient has been increasing rather than diminishing, and so, as in most other industrial societies, has the dispersion of wages and salaries around the mean among employees. It is unlikely that there should not be some correlation with academic performance in such a credential-conscious society as Japan, but that is not captured by a crude graduate/non-graduate distinction. SOCIAL MOBILITY Equality of outcomes and changes in the income distribution are one thing; equality of opportunity is another. The grand social mobility studies tell one very little about recent decades and use only the crudest distinctions of school and university ‘quality’ (Ishida 1991). More informative is Higuchi’s recent attempt (1992) to squeeze enlightenment out of official statistics and the informal university rankings provided by the cram schools. He finds, first of all, that the effect of parental income on the probability that a child will go to a university at all has steadily diminished, even though university fees have steadily increased in proportion to incomes (from a little over 1 per cent of the annual income of the average 45–49-year old for national universities, and 6 per cent for private universities in the mid–1970s, to 6 per cent and 10 per cent respectively in 1990). But second he finds that there was, for 1990 graduates, a considerable effect of parental income on the probability of entering a university of high prestige, with difficult entrance examinations usually attempted only by those who have had high hensachi ratings in their high school. It is, moreover, the impression of many observers, borne out by the parental income figures given on scholarship application forms by students at the top universities, that the correlation between parental income (and occupational prestige category) and childrens’s academic performance is growing. The general assumption is that the correlation is explained by economic factors—
Who goes where? 41 the much greater expenditure by well-off families on educational aids and cram-school fees which is demonstrated clearly in the family budget surveys. Educational sociologists who have looked into the matter, however, (for example, Moriyama and Noguchi 1984) claim that large expenditures on out-of-school tuition seem not to make much difference to performance, and attribute the correlation more to cultural, rather than to economic, factors—books about the home; the conversation over the breakfast table; and high aspirations which might explain why children from higher status families do well even in subjects like maths which are not often casually discussed over the breakfast table. These differences in aspirations are, however, not all that easy to detect in a society as culturally homogeneous as Japan, and some brave spirits suggest that genetics might have something to do with it—the effect of several generations of credential-meritocratic mobility and assortive mating. The suspicion that this might be so make it all too delicate a topic for any but the boldest spirits to tackle. So one is reduced to anecdote, and there are many which support the common sense perception that equality of opportunity increased massively in the first three decades after the war and that occupational destiny has a good deal more to do with native ability as compared with parental social status than used to be the case. One might cite, for example, the observation of a senior engineer on the success of the quality circles (work process improvement groups) in his factory. He attributed a lot to the initiative, the leadership, the sustained level of intellectual curiosity and the inventiveness of some of his senior foremen: ‘Nowadays they would have gone to one of the top universities, but they left school at fifteen—at twelve some of the older ones. One never seems to get people of that calibre coming out of high school into blue collar jobs these days.’ That can serve as a final reminder of the pervasive implications of the mechanisms to the description of which this chapter has been devoted. The way education and training systems sort and label people and thereby influence their occupational destinations is a very important aspect of those systems. It rivals and (for a society’s economic functioning at least) may even surpass in importance the aspect to which attention is more frequently devoted—the way schools seek to influence the intellectual (as well as the aesthetic and moral) development of their charges.

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