Permalink : http://hdl.handle.net/2115/56822

JaLCDOI : 10.14943/J.HighEdu.20.45

‘Graduate school common education’ means a program consisting of classes that are taught commonly among graduate schools in a university. It is practiced mainly at research universities in order to provide liberal arts education and career education at the graduate school level as well as the undergraduate level, and it is an important component of graduate education when a university plans to reform its graduate education. This article first reviews earlier studies about graduate school common education, and next surveys current examples of graduate school common education at universities in Japan. The main part of this article describes graduate school common education at the University of Tokyo, which is different from graduate school common education at most other universities, including that practiced by Hokkaido University and Tsukuba University. The University of Tokyo provides an expensive program, called the ‘Executive Management Program,’ for non-traditional students; that is, businessmen, administrators and specialists, on Fridays and Saturdays. Furthermore, the university provides ‘graduate school intersection programs,’ which should be called ‘sub-major programs’ because students get certificates after finishing them. Traditionally, graduate school education was carried out exclusively by each department as a unit in universities, at what might be called the time of “department education.” Then there was a time when department education and graduate school common education were opposing components of graduate education. After this, graduate school common education has become indispensable as a complementary component that should be added to the main component of graduate education, that is, department education, when a university plans to reform graduate education in order to make it more substantial.