Photo/Illutration Newly enrolled students at Tokyo's Waseda University gather in front of Okuma Auditorium. (Nobuaki Tanaka)

Only about five universities are strongly interested in applying for a government program intended to raise research to an international level, a questionnaire by The Asahi Shimbun showed.

Recently passed legislation will establish a fund of 10 trillion yen ($78 billion) for universities.

The money will be managed by asset management companies, and the returns will be distributed to universities certified by the government as being an outstanding research university on an international scale.

The Asahi Shimbun sent out questionnaires from mid-May to 43 universities that have the highest shares of published journal articles in the natural sciences as defined by the education ministry, as well as three graduate schools.

Nagoya University, Tohoku University and Waseda University said they intend to submit applications. Osaka University and the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology said they were considering moving toward submitting applications.

Between five to seven universities will be chosen after applications are accepted in the current fiscal year. The support will then begin from fiscal 2024.

However, in return for receiving the financial support, which could total several tens of billions of yen per year per university, the institutions also have to meet certain conditions, such as producing internationally outstanding research results and 3 percent annual growth in university operations.

The latter condition has led to concerns being raised that universities would focus on research that can produce financial results in the short term and ignore basic research that may take years before any applied results emerge.

As a result, the University of Tokyo and Kyoto University, perhaps Japan’s two best-known research universities, are among the institutions that said they were still considering applying.

In the questionnaire, the University of Tokyo pointed to the many unclear points of the program as a major reason for taking a passive approach, while Kyoto University said it would consider what to do after carefully observing how the government acts.

Experts cited the sound operational environment of those two institutions for not having to depend on additional support from the government, giving them the option of a wait-and-see approach.

Twelve universities said they would not apply during the first year of the program. These include Yokohama City University, Kagoshima University and Shinshu University.

In explaining its decision, Kagoshima University said if university research was to be compared to a mountain, the university fund would focus more on making the summit higher rather than spreading out the base of the mountain.

Universities in rural areas said it would be difficult to clear the conditions for gaining certification under the government program.

Kyushu University said there was the possibility a few elite universities would end up head-hunting excellent researchers from other institutions, leading to a concentration of personnel and research funds at those few universities, while the overall research level of most other universities would decline.

The government has also set up a separate program to support universities in rural regions that would be outside the scope of the university fund.

The level of support pales in comparison, however, to the 10 trillion-yen fund, with the combined amount in the fiscal 2021 supplementary budget and fiscal 2022 initial budget came at just 63.5 billion yen.

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