Temple University, Japan Campus (TUJ) hit a milestone in undergraduate student enrollment this spring for the first time in its 34-year history. The final enrollment of 1,000 undergraduate students follows a trend in rapid growth over the past couple of years.
The high enrollment is mostly due to the unprecedented success in recruiting and the environment that supports the drive. The combination of new marketing/recruiting strategies and the weakening of the Japanese yen contributed to the record breaking new student numbers in the last couple of years. The weakening of the yen makes TUJ tuition more reasonable for foreign students, as tuition is paid in yen. The effort to retain students has also contributed to the high enrollment (e.g. retention rate for fall 2015 to spring 2016 was about 90%).
Japanese universities and the Ministry of Education, Sport, Culture, Science and Technology (MEXT) have been emphasizing the need for Japanese universities to develop more international liberal arts, English-based degree programs. As Japanese prospective students and their parents understand the importance of an international liberal arts education, they are also coming to realize that TUJ provides the best such education in Japan (about 40% of undergraduate students at TUJ are Japanese). At the same time, TUJ has significantly raised its profile by being very active in promoting the internationalization of university education in the Japanese higher education community.