Development of public policy education

Policy affairs have largely been researched, discussed and taught in Japan at faculties and schools of law, political science and economics within several universities, where they are analysed from the perspective of each discipline. The first such undergraduate school, which is clearly oriented to policy study and whose name is associated with the notion of policy, was established in 1990 as a Faculty of Policy Management. This came about approximately 100 years after the first official university in Japan was organised.

The existence of the first undergraduate school of policy education had both a horizontal and a vertical influence on the constellation of Japanese universities. In particular, more policy education schools are being established at the undergraduate level, while the Faculty of Policy Management has added on a graduate school that has induced similar actions at other policy education undergraduate schools. Hence, there are now roughly 100 policy education undergraduate and graduate schools in Japan.

Due to these trends in policy education at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (MEXT) has issued a guideline on graduate education, which will be described in the second section. If the existing system of graduate education could be referred to as containing ‘academic’ graduate schools, then we can assert that a new system of ‘professional’ graduate schools has been established, in which more emphasis is laid on the practical and vocational aspects of graduate education. In the framework of these professional graduate schools, a new type of graduate school for policy education – a professional graduate public policy school – has been established. Thus, in Japan, there are two different streams of policy education: the academic type at both the undergraduate and graduate levels; and the professional type at the graduate level.

The next section will discuss the development and perspectives of professional graduate public policy schools in the context of the coexistence of the two different types. It will also examine the institutional aspects of the professional school system. The third section will present a concrete example of these schools, while the fourth will introduce a special system for the quality management of professional graduate schools, particularly accreditation.