Univ. mergers seen as a formula for survival
This is an installment of The Yomiuri Shimbun's Education Renaissance series. This part of the series focuses on reorganizing and revitalizing universities.
Pharmacists must be able to determine whether one medication will work well when combined with another. Now, administrators at a university that trains pharmacists are trying to determine whether their institution will work better when combined with another.
There have been no mergers among private four-year universities for decades, but now some of the nation's most prestigious ones have begun working on them.
In one example, Kyoritsu University of Pharmacy and Keio University, both in Minato Ward, Tokyo, announced Nov. 20 that they had agreed to discuss a merger.
Kyoritsu suggested the merger to Keio in October 2005. Founded in 1930 as a pharmaceutical school for women, Kyoritsu enjoys a stable financial condition and boasts the third-highest ratio of successful applicants for the national exam for pharmacists. Yet the university has experienced growing anxiety over its future.
Since 2006, pharmacy courses at universities have been extended to six years from four years, with the aim of giving students more clinical experience. This change has caused fewer applicants to apply for such courses, even while the number of private universities with the specialized course increased to 50 in the 2006 academic year from 29 four years earlier, with another five set to join the list in the coming academic year.
In addition, students are now required to spend five months training at hospitals and pharmacies, more than five times longer than before, which is making it difficult for universities to secure training places for their students and forcing them to pay higher training fees to hospitals. Kyoritsu now pays 50,000 yen per student in such expenditures each month.
In this regard, the pharmaceutical university has identified Keio as its best partner in a potential merger as the latter has its own hospital and is also financially stable.
As one of the nation's top private universities, Keio also found the offer attractive. Keio University now has a School of Medicine and a Faculty of Nursing and Medical Care, which was founded in 2001. Adding a pharmaceutical faculty would enable the university to improve its overall medical system and facilitate better collaboration between the medicine-related faculties and the Faculty of Science and Technology.
"Today, universities have to compete fiercely against each other [for students], even across national boundaries," said Keio University President Yuichiro Anzai, 60. "Welcoming students majoring in pharmacy will encourage our existing students to expand their viewpoints."
Yoshiyuki Hashimoto, 76, chairman of the board of directors at Kyoritsu University of Pharmacy, emphasized his institution's ability to discuss a merger at this moment, saying: "It's because we now enjoy a stable financial condition and have good-quality students. It would be late to have such discussion if we waited until after we faced a crisis."
Practical results of the merger talks could already be seen on the morning of Jan. 20, the first day of the two-day national university entrance examinations, for which Kyoritsu was one of the testing sites.
Kyoritsu allocates some of its enrollment to students who have been screened through the unified national exams rather than the university's own exams. For this entrance season, 1,989 examinees applied in this category, a ratio of 13.26 applicants for every available slot, up from 4.56 the previous year.
"This may be just a temporary situation, but it's had a much stronger impact than expected. I believe we made the right choice," Hashimoto said.
Meanwhile, two universities in the Kansai region are also moving toward a merger. Kwansei Gakuin University has also been working on merging with Seiwa College, both of which have campuses in Nishinomiya, Hyogo Prefecture. Seiwa consists of two schools dealing with education and humanities, but the later school has been attracting a dwindling number of applicants--a factor that made Seiwa suggest a merger with Kwansei in the autumn two years ago.
Kwansei welcomed the offer because it was just considering setting up a teacher-training course.
In addition to their close locations, the two institutions share founding philosophies based in Christianity, and many of Seiwa's presidents are Kwansei alumni. These favorable conditions have helped the schools reach the agreement.
Kwansei will set up a school of human welfare studies in 2008 and add a school of education one year later, when it is to merge with Seiwa.
"Currently we have a student body of 19,000, which we aim at increasing to 25,000 within five years. We can't boast excellent education and research without a large scale [as a university]," said Kwansei President Kazuo Hiramatsu, 59. "We're famous in the western part of Japan, but we want to make our university known nationwide."
However, Kwansei and Seiwa have decided to postpone their initial 2008 target for the merger by one year, mainly because they have failed to reach agreements on philosophies and other details over the newly launched school of education.
In the Keio-Kyoritsu case, on the other hand, they have yet to decide whether to keep the Kyoritsu name after the merger. There are still rough roads ahead for these institutions.