Japan University Rankings 2025: methodology

The Japan University Rankings 2025 will be published on 3 April.

The Times Higher Education Japan University Rankings use a balanced scorecard approach, with 16 individual performance indicators combining to create an overall score that reflects the broad strength of an institution. The overall methodology explores four key areas, which we call pillars.

Now in its eighth edition, the ranking is designed to answer the questions that matter most to students and their families when making one of the most important decisions of their lives – who to trust with their education. 

Resources

This pillar includes metrics on finance (income) per student (8%), which shows whether the institution has the money to effectively deliver teaching, and the ratio of faculty members to students (8%), which gives a sense of whether the college has enough teachers to teach. We also look at the scholarly output (7%) and research grants per member of staff (5%) at each institution. Having faculty who are experts in their academic fields can significantly enhance a student’s educational experience. The final metric measures the national mock university exam scores (6%) received by institutions’ entrants to get an indication of the academic calibre required to gain admission to a particular university and its popularity among top students.

Engagement

This pillar measures opinions of the university from two sources: the High School Advisors Survey, and the Japan Student Survey. The High School Advisors Survey gathers the views of student careers advisers from between 1,000 and 2,000 Japanese secondary schools each year. It asks advisers to name up to 15 universities that they believe teach students to the highest global standards (6%), and up to 15 universities that they think are best at developing students’ abilities (6%). We are also using data from the past two years of our student survey. Responses to seven questions are used in three metrics in the following manner:

• The engagement metric (6%) uses scores from four questions, asking to what extent teaching at the university (1) supports critical thinking, (2) supports making connections among the things students have learned, (3) supports applying the students’ learning to the real world and (4) offers classes that challenge the students.
• The interaction metric (6%) uses scores from two questions, asking how many opportunities the students had to (1) interact with the staff and faculty and (2) collaborate with their peers.
• The recommendation metric (6%) uses scores from one question, which asks how likely students would be to recommend their university to friends or family.

Outcomes

This pillar looks at the overall academic reputation (8%) of the university in Japan, based on votes from Japanese scholars in THE’s annual Academic Reputation Survey of leading academics worldwide, which helps us determine which institutions have the best reputation for excellence in teaching. We also consider the reputation of the university among employers (8%) to get a sense of whether the university produces graduates the market wants. This is based on a survey of human resources departments from more than 700 listed and non-listed companies. Each department was asked to identify up to 10 universities they considered the best based on the strengths of their employees from those institutions. Each department then completed a survey for each of the universities that it identified, rating the employees from these institutions in several areas.

Environment

This pillar looks at the make-up of the student and staff body at each campus, helping students determine whether they will find themselves in a diverse, supportive and inclusive university environment. We examine the proportions of international students (5%) and international staff (5%) on campus, which are key indicators of whether the university is able to attract talent from across the world. It also demonstrates which institutions have cultivated a multicultural campus where students from different backgrounds have the opportunity to learn from one another. We are also looking at two dimensions of internationalisation: the number of students in various types of international exchange programmes (5%), and the number of courses taught in a language other than Japanese (5%).

Note: We have now returned to using the latest reported numbers of students participating in international exchange programmes, after using historic data for the previous two editions of the ranking (because those numbers were significantly impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic). The figures used in this edition relate to the 2023 academic year.

Data sources

Data for the rankings come from a variety of sources. These include self-submitted data from the institutions themselves as well as data gathered from Elsevier, Benesse Corporation, Nikkei Human Resources, the Japanese government and the THE Academic Reputation Survey. Our data are, in most cases, normalised so that the value we assign in each metric can be compared sensibly with other metrics.

Rankings table

Pillar scores are provided only when the university is in the top 150 for that pillar, and those ranked below the top 100 overall are given a banded score. The table can be ordered by overall or pillar scores, and filtered by prefecture.