An ongoing backlash by international students against a decision announced by Musashino Art University, Tokyo to hike tuition rates for foreign students entering in 2025 has set off alarm bells in Japan’s higher education sector.
The new fees, announced in July, mean that international students will pay approximately 20% more than domestic students, whose fees remain unchanged.
Experts contend a hike in all tuition fees is inevitable as universities continue to experience the effects of a dwindling domestic university student population.
But earlier moves by the University of Tokyo to raise fees by 18% from next year for both domestic and international students led to campus protests in May.
Musashino Art University is the first to announce fee hikes for foreign students only.
“The higher education sector views overseas students as representing a badly needed, but largely untapped, lifeline as the pool of young Japanese shrinks,” said Professor Jeff Kingston, who teaches Japan-Asia relations at Temple University, Japan – the oldest and largest foreign university in Japan.
“Many Japanese universities want to attract more foreign students. A two-tier tuition scheme is bad PR [public relations] even though [it is] not unusual in other countries,” Kingston said, predicting a “wait and see” approach among other universities to gauge reaction to tuition fee hikes.
Support for international students
The protests at Musashino Art University over what are being described by protesters as the “arbitrary” and “discriminatory” levies, have taken place at sites which include the entrance to a central railway station in the capital.
Physical demonstrations have been backed by an online petition also signed by students from Tama Art University and Tokyo University of Arts. Organisers reported 5,000 signatures in August.
Musashino Art University is a leading private university in Tokyo with foreign students numbering around 700 and making up 15% of its student body. The majority are Chinese nationals.
In July, the university’s management announced the “Study Environment Improvement Fee for International Students” as it called the extra annual levy of JPY363,000 (approximately US$2,490), starting from fiscal year 2025.
There was previously no difference between local and international fees. According to its website, the university, first launched in 1929, generally charges JPY1.6 million annually.
A statement released by Musashino Art University said the aim of the fee was to expand Japanese language and culture programmes for foreign students. It referred to the levy as providing “funds that will be used to support international students”.
It noted that international students have increased in number, resulting in new responsibilities to improve the learning environment.
It also pledged to set up a “dedicated support desk and expand scholarships for students with excellent grades, including new programmes for Japanese language education”.
But international students are not convinced. They stress that their financial difficulties in Japan are also linked to regulations that permit overseas students to work only 28 hours per week.
In particular, they argue against increasing Japanese language education, noting that as foreign students they have already invested in two years of Japanese language classes before entering university.
Tuition fee ‘liberalisation’
Discussions to raise university tuition for foreign students have become increasingly prominent against the backdrop of inflation and the downsizing of public subsidies that have decreased by 10% annually.
A proposal by a panel of cabinet members and private-sector experts in April last year called for more flexibility in the tuition fee system and recognised the need to expand Japanese language and counselling programmes for foreign students.
This led to a ‘liberalisation’ of tuition fees in March this year with the abolishment of the cap on tuition fees for foreign students in the country’s 86 national universities. At the time, government officials insisted that they did not expect tuition hikes to discourage overseas student applications.
Japan has set a new target of accepting 400,000 international students by 2033, amid competition for international students from a number of countries in Asia, including South Korea, China, Malaysia and others.
A July interim report by the Ministry of Education on the “State of Higher Education in Future Society” also estimated a close to 20% fall in Japanese student university enrolment by 2040.
The report calls for “optimisation of the overall scale of higher education” focusing on the need for universities to look at re-organising, consolidating and downsizing.
Experts point out that Japanese tuition fees – private universities charge around JPY950,000 annually – are much lower than tuition fees in the UK or USA among institutions that offer English language study and attract international talent.
“The lower fees in Japan and Japanese language instruction have made arts degrees particularly popular with Chinese students,” said Kenji Ito, manager at Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University (APU), which has international students making up half its student body.
He said APU, which receives public subsidies and private donations that support scholarships, is not planning to increase tuition fees. “Students are accepted based on their English ability,” he said.
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