Okayama University, a publicly funded university (national uni), has announced a proposal to sharply raise tuition for foreigners starting in the 2027 academic year. The current annual tuition is 535,800 yen for both Japanese and international students, but under the proposal, foreigners (but not Japanese nationals) would pay 1,339,500 yen per year, 2.5 times the current amount (Japanese nationals would also see tuition rise, but only to 647,296 yen).
Some students worry that the price hike on foreigners will make Okayama University accessible only to foreigners from wealthy families
An expert quoted in the article questioned whether such a large increase is really justified and suggested Japan should consider more financial aid options for international students that need it if tuition rises.
by Always2Learn
22 comments
Pardon my ignorance. But who tf was choosing Okayama Uni in the first place. Y’all must really like anime to travel to Japan to study at…Okayama university
So, you want foreigners to stay uneducated. This is idiotic and will bite you in the ass 30 years later.
Then again, whoever came up with this crap probably knows they won’t make another 10 years, so they are safe. Huh.
Wealthy foreigners?
2.5 x 535k yen = 1337500 Yen roughly.
International students abroad in other countries like Australia, USA, and Canada pay heaps more.
In Australia for example the tuition often hits 50k $ annually.
Just another anti foreigner policy, just for the boomers to keep crying about declining population….
This is common in the rest of the world as well. The state college I graduated from charges $7700 per year for state residents and $44,000 per year for international students. The understanding is that as a state residents you or your parents have been helping fund state programs like education for several years so the tuition is lower compared to someone who is going to go to school for 4 years, reap the rewards then leave back to their home country.
This is the problem with the current anti immigrant climate across the globe. Tough but fair policies are one thing, but this schizophrenic change to randomly harsh penalties. Your entire life can be uprooted even if you planned properly, did everything to respect the culture, just cause politicians need to feed the mob mentality of regards getting their daily social media dopamine fix. Not even calling out Japan, but the sentiment across the globe. My own fellow Americans are an F-ing embarrassment.
I cannot afford 私立 at all, so I was gonna take a shot at 国立.. so much for that I guess
Okayama university is only one out of many, but the fact that this is being discussed at all is worrying. I can’t enroll in a university if there is a real possibility of tuition being raised by such a ridiculous amount based solely on my nationality
Basically don’t bother studying on Japan, they don’t want you.
In many Asian countries, to be promoted in some companies and academia, its required to spend time abroad studying or working. Many foreign students come to Japan because its much cheaper that western universities but has the same level of prestige. They can also access higher levels of education that might be hard to access in thier own countries due to lack of places or specialities.
Increasing fees is essentially saying Japan no longer wants to support the development of S.E countries. It also harms a lot of the partnership type agreements Japan has with other countries further isolating the country.
A piece of context that seems to be missing from both the article and the OP is that it’s not 100% clear which students are affected. The article separated it into “留学生” and “日本人”, which is decidedly annoying–if it’s only affecting international students, I’m 100% fine with this change, but I think it’s important not to raise tuition for students who’ve lived their entire lives here and gone through the domestic education system.
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International students pay an absolute fortune at Australian universities too, so I don’t find this too surprising.
I’d be curious about foreigners who have residency in Japan. By the time my kids are old enough to go to college they will have PR. (Probably) I don’t know that that specific university will be the one, but I wonder if like many things they’re just blanketing gaijin instead of people who work and live here. My kids have only ever gone to school in Japan.
Good. That’s way too cheap for foreigners they don’t need to subsidize uni for other countries citizens
It’s interesting because I thought that the idea of increasing foreign students was to make up for projected lack of Japanese students in the near future. But then this maybe will put some off. Then again, if you only need 1 foreign student to cover the cost of 2 Japanese, then I don’t know. Seems like a bit of a gamble anyway.
Great way to attract that foreign talent
Wasn’t there a limit to how much a national university can raise their tuition?
I don’t think it’s so bad to charge actual international students more, but they shouldn’t charge foreign residents more. Some of those people have lived in Japan their entire life.
The best Japanese universities don’t exactly compare to the best western universities, so this is one area I can’t really see them affording to charge foreign students too much more than the standard.
Its probably going to be another route for funneling scholarship money into university pockets rather than actual students paying a premium for the most part.
Other countries charge foreign students ridiculous fees to study compared to Japan. What’s the big deal ? Still so cheap compared to the US or Australia, talk about getting ripped off there ffs.
See how this worked in Canada, Ontario especially. The schools started recruiting more and more international students cause they could charge them 5x the domestic student tuition. Rapidly expanded their programs and relaxed their academic standards to keep them here to keep making money off them (if you fail, we don’t get next year’s tuition!) Didn’t care about whether there was housing or jobs for them in the local communities, leaving many students struggling in poverty and dealing with increased anti-foreigner attitude from locals. But the people in charge of the schools got rich!
It had been common practice to charge international students more for a long time, but then I guess a few people realized they could take advantage of that and really went to town.
I did my graduate degrees at a national university and now work at a private university. I basically paid nothing for it and am grateful for–but, I’m not really against these kinds of changes at national or public unis. I also did my undergraduate at a public institution in a different country where I also didn’t have citizenship, and I *did* pay much more for it than local students. I was completely OK with this. Public universities are funded in large part by taxes, which international students who move countries for universities generally haven’t paid. I’ve now paid lots of Japanese taxes, but if I had gone home, they would have got nothing out of me, for all that I got from them.
The real question is what does “foreign” mean. Students who have been (or whose parents have been) paying into the system shouldn’t be treated in the same way, but the language used is very ambiguous. People often use the term “留学生” to refer to allllllll international students, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the university distinguishes it differently. For example, the university I work for does offer international students tuition waivers, but they need to be on 留学 visas. Students with PR are not treated as international students for those purposes–they literally don’t count as 留学生.
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