Photo credit: Sergio Pirrone
Musashino Art University in Tokyo has released in their 2024-2025 tuition fee chart that they will increase tuition by 20% for international students entering in 2025. This fee hike was announced in July, raising concerns in Japan’s higher education sector.
Musashino Art University is a leading private art university with around 700 international students, making up nearly 15% of its student population. The majority of these students are Chinese nationals.
The tuition fee chart noted that they will be introducing the “Study Environment Improvement Fee for International Students” which will be an extra 363,000 JPY (around 3,354,000 KRW) starting from fiscal year 2025. Previously there were no differences in tuition fees for domestic and international students.
A university’s fee increase isn’t unheard of in Japan, as the University of Tokyo raised its tuition by 18%. However, the difference between the two institutions is that the University of Tokyo increased its tuition for everyone. Musashino Art University is the first to announce fee increases specifically for international students.
“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 noted.
A statement released by the Musashino Art University claimed that this newly introduced extra fee would be used to expand Japanese language programs and provide other support for international students. They noted that international students have increased in number and therefore the school needs the funds.
However, international students are not very convinced, as they claim that their work-hour limit on their student visa makes things difficult enough already. The Japanese language program also does not have much merit as international students are required to take at least two years of Japanese classes before being admitted.
As of April last year, the Japanese cabinet called for more flexibility in the Japanese tuition system. Starting in March this year, the cap on tuition fees for international students in the country’s 86 national universities was abolished. The government officials responsible were adamant that this would not deter international students from applying to Japanese universities.
Japan’s new target of accepting 400,000 international students by 2033 and their increasing competition for students with South Korea, China, and Hong Kong make this difficult. The overall lower fees in Japanese universities compared to universities in the US or UK have long been touted as a strength in attracting international students. However, as Musashino Art University leads the charge in a new trend of potential price gouging, Japan’s new target of 400,000 students could be a more difficult goal than expected.
저작권자 ⓒ 국제학교뉴스, 무단 전재 및 재배포 금지