Information disclosure benefits colleges, students

Shigeru Nakanishi

From next spring, the nation's universities will be required to publicly divulge a variety of information, such as the number of new students.

The opening up of information comes on the back of universities becoming more internationalized and attendance becoming more common in recent years.

The Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Ministry will revise its ministerial ordinances this summer and urge universities to make their information more transparent and accessible, by placing them on a Web site, for example.

While the population of 18-year-olds is on the decline, there are now 778 four-year universities and colleges--a 50 percent increase over the number of schools 20 years ago.

As a result, many of these schools have failed to meet their intake quotas, making it difficult for universities to ensure academic quality.

With ever-intensifying international competition among universities, it has become necessary for schools to reorganize and disclose their data to attract more students from abroad and to deepen exchanges with foreign educational institutions through the credit exchange system.

South Korea, for instance, obliges its universities to disclose a variety of data, including capacity and dropout rates, which are then placed in a database.

This disclosure of information is in line with the times, as even universities are not immune to globalization.

The information subject to the disclosure was detailed in a progress report by the university quality guarantee panel under the Central Council for Education. (Full disclosure: I am a member of the panel.) The data will be divided into three groups, rated by level of obligation. Required information, which all is quite reasonable, includes releasing the number of new students. Yet, many universities do not disclose their data out of fear of their capacity rate becoming public knowledge.

Information the ministry would like to see disclosed, but will not require to be, includes dropout rates, which are deemed important for assessing a university's academics. This sort of information will be classified as "data whose disclosure should be considered from an international viewpoint."

A dropout rate may be affected by strict instructional methods or an inadequate education. Recently, an increasing number of students have been forced to leave school due to financial difficulty.

The panel may have decided to postpone the mandatory disclosure of such data because of this current economic situation. Yet each bit of data can be interpreted in a variety of ways, making it important for universities to collect relevant data and explain them in detail.

In the 2009 school year, more than 90 percent of the 529 universities that participated in a Yomiuri Shimbun survey on university competency provided their dropout rates. Such disclosure is merely in line with the times.

Some universities actually managed to markedly improve their dropout rates after disclosing them. More universities should disclose such data that is not required to be made public.

The key point, though, regarding how much information actually gets disclosed boils down to how the nation's top universities handle the matter of "data whose disclosure should be considered from an international viewpoint."

The education ministry said this is just the first round. "If this disclosure proves to get enough attention, universities of a certain caliber will have no choice but to make public 'data whose disclosure should be considered from an international viewpoint,'" said Akio Fujiwara, head of the ministry's University Promotion Division.

Transparency may even become a requirement for government funding.

The disclosure of information by universities is not an issue limited only to tertiary education.

Taiji Yamauchi--who authored a book based on his visits to all of the country's universities and the data he gleaned from them--noted how information can change people's attitudes toward a school. "Unless high schools and university prep schools change their student guidance methods, there will be no change in attitude toward a university, no matter how enthusiastic about education and information disclosure a school is," he said.

The education ministry will call on educational corporations--universities' managing bodies--to disclose information on their corporate management, along with educational information.

In either case, there would be no sense in publicizing such information if the method by which it was released was difficult to understand.

By taking this opportunity, universities need to carefully consider what they will release and how they will release it. On the other side of the equation, guidance counselors, parents and students need to carefully use this information to examine the universities they are considering.

Nakanishi is a senior researcher at Yomiuri Research Institute.