日本の大学・大学院と一般社会との連携について -職業教育はどのようにして担われるべきか-

Abstract

Historically, universities in Japan have been required few roles. They have needed to educate only researchers, and companies have trained the graduates as highly and generally skilled professionals. Today, however, the economic crisis let the corporates to give up to train professionals by themselves, and the American-modeled higher education system requires each university to train the majority of students as professionals. Universities need to train students as professional, but they don' t know how to train them. To solve this problem, universities and companies have to cooperate on the vocational education. However, there is another large problem. On the cooperation, universities need to grant the companies' request, but often, the demands from corporates changes frequently. If universities accepted every claim from corporates, the education programs would be confused and would collapse. In addition, training researchers is also important. We have to consider the balance of vocational education and researcher education. In USA, Professional Science Master' s （PSM） is highly rated degree in which many professionals are trained, and many research universities provide the degree. With this example, we point out that there is the third actor. We call it “Buffer body” . The buffer body can serve as coordinator between universities and companies, and may contribute to better higher education reform.