A Merger Prototype Led by Private Universities in Japan

Keio University and Kyoritsu University of Pharmacy have agreed to a merger to take effect in 2008. The plan is for Keio to establish a Department of Pharmacy by merging with Kyoritsu University of Pharmacy (both based in Tokyo). This will be Japan's third merger between four-year private universities.

Following modified requirements of the National Pharmaceutical Examination, Kyoritsu has experienced a 65% decline in the number of applicants, when shifting its four-year course to a six-year pharmacy course. Together with the country's declining birthrates, the competition among Japan's higher education institutions is increasing in severity. Against this background, Kyoritsu approached Keio with the merger plan and Keio, one of the country's leading private universities, accepted.

The presidents of these universities foresee complementary advantages through this merger. Keio has had medical and nursing programs, but no pharmacy programs, and Kyoritsu is a single-disciplinary institution that now looks to the training of high-quality pharmacists within Keio's advanced academic environment.

For the full story, see The Yomiuri Shimbun, November 21, 2006, "Keio, Kyoritsu Univ. of Pharmacy eye merger."

In the Japanese higher education system, mergers are generally considered less problematic within the public sector than within the private sector. There have been 17 previous mergers on the public side (national and municipal), accelerated since the launch of the National University Corporatization Law in 2004, by which all the public institutions were simultaneously asked for institutional reforms. On the other hand, the private institutions belong to different School Corporations distinguished from one another by culture, history, tradition, and financial sources, so that their mergers have been less frequent. Instead, private institutions more commonly seek their managerial change within institutions by "academic drift," for instance, shifting from 2-year to 4-year programs as well as from single-sex to coeducation. Yet such shifts may be precursors to mergers of private universities. Still, private-public mergers have not occurred in Japan, whereas they have occurred in various forms in places such as China and Chile.

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