Japan's Universities Are Failing

Would it really help the average student? I went to Berkley for a semester, and in some courses we watched the professor on video. He literally phoned it in.

I actually had a better learning experience at my local community college.

This is just my subjective experience.

I have known too many people who literally drank/hallucinated their way through an Ivy League school. They graduate, and don't tell anyone the truth about their fancy college learning experience. There's no test at the end to correlate into an empirical metric. It's just, "I graduated from this UC, or Whatever!".

I would like to see every school that accepts federal/state tax money give their students a standardized test, and future funding would be based on the collective students score. It would have to be a fair balanced test. Instead of I graduated from MIT; it would be I graduated with a 95%.

It might level out the playing field? It would prevent networking--maybe? It would prevent having to "kiss ass"? It would prevent me from throwing up in my mouth when a new Princeton graduate puts on the horned rimmed glasses shortly after graduation, and just expects respect.

The education system, as the article points out, is underfunded not because they don't have the money, but because they're spending it on other things.

And one sure method to destroying your way of life is to let a bunch of people in who are there for the money and aren't particularly interested in your way of life. If you're a Japanese person in Japan and you don't want to live in another country, why would you want other countries to live with you?

Japan is a resource-poor country without much arable land. They could stand to have a smaller population. From what I can see the only real downside to a smaller population is military power, and in the age of nuclear weapons I'm not sure how much it matters, particularly for an island nation.

Yes. Because of culture clashes. New Culture B doesn't like how existing Culture A "does things" and demands a change. While they are some small minority, they often get ignored by the majority (Culture A). Over time, as more and more of Culture B immigrates into Culture A, they become large enough of a group that they can no longer be ignored. If Culture B was totally fine with adopting Culture A and adding to the culture rather than demanding things be done their way "culture killing" wouldn't be as large of an issue.

If each culture was 100% identical they would be the same culture, not different cultures. So there will always be culture clash.

One such example of cultures clash is Japan's "cute culture" is often seen as perverted from the outside world and there are often calls to censor things that are seen as being totally innocent in Japan.

What side you think is "right" or "wrong" is largely opinion in most cases and the two sides will fight - and hopefully (but rarely) those fights never escalate past yelling at one another.