A Transformation From Institutional Research to Inter-Institutional Research and Interregional and Inter-Institutional Research in Japan: Responding to Diverse Realities for the Development of Common Horizon

• In Event: Educational Responsibility for Students of Diverse Backgrounds and Social Identities in the United States, Japan, China, and Malaysia

Abstract

The offices of institutional research (IR) are almost ubiquitous across higher educational communities in developed countries including Japan. Visible progress has been observed in their in-house education management including admission and enrollment management, course offerings, curriculum development, as well as in the assessment of learning outcomes. However, IR now faces a new challenge that cannot be solved in-house and within one region. Due to the increasing academic mobility witnessed among students and researchers, today’s IR has to be designed, developed, and managed for students and researchers from diverse economic, cultural and demographic backgrounds through both institutional and inter-institutional efforts. This trend demands new theories, methods, and practices that can be applied beyond political, socio-economic, racial, cultural, as well as regional boundaries.
While IR has been often used to enhance the institutional strategy to compete with other institutions in the market, IR now has to consolidate a new framework where institutions “compete AND cooperate” with each other. For a conceptual interpretation aimed at inter-institutional and inter-regional competition and cooperation, this study compares traditional organizational theories such as comparative advantage hypothesis (Dornbusch, Fischer & Samuelson, 1977; Ricardo, 1817) and competitive advantage hypothesis (Porter, 1985). The comparative advantage hypothesis suggests that if different institutions in the market have their own competitive advantage, all players can benefit by trading with each other. The competitive advantage hypothesis on the other hand is governed by an absolute value in the free market. If institutions have an incentive to develop higher quality goods or services to sell them at higher prices in the market, the free mobility of students will bring about greater disparity in the demand for education among institutions, which will in turn reflect in a higher tuition for students to learn at high quality institutions.
The empirical part of this study examines the potential for universities to pursue a comparative advantage. Through a cross-institutional survey at seven research universities in Japan, skills and competences that were identified as critical were compared at the respective institutions based on the answers by the university stakeholders including the faculty, students, graduates, and employers. We established that there are different expectations and priorities for skills and competences to be developed, even in the same academic area. This suggests that the rule of comparative advantage can be applied, which may facilitate both student mobility and cooperation among the institutions. We also compared the results in Japan with those in the EU since both regions conducted the same survey. Although data according to the institutions were not available in the EU, clear differences were recognized between the two regions over the skills that were expected to be developed in universities, thus region-specific comparative strengths were identified, which would promote mobility between the regions.
This study attempts to discuss and introduce a new IR framework that responds to diverse realities to develop a common horizon, which involves a transformation from IR to IIR (Inter-institutional Research) and then to IRIR (Inter-regional and Inter-Institutional Research).

Author

• Yukari Matsuzuka, Hitotsubashi University