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Higher education in Japan is provided at universities , junior colleges , colleges of technology and special training schools and community colleges. Of these four types of institutions, only universities and junior colleges are strictly considered postsecondary education providers. The modern Japanese higher education system has undergone numerous changes since the Meiji period and was largely modeled after Western countries such as Germany, France, Britain, and the United States with traditional Japanese pedagogical elements to create a unique Japanese model to serve its national needs. The Japanese higher education system differs from higher education in most other countries in many significant ways. Key differences include the method of acceptance, which relies almost entirely on one or two tests, as opposed to the usage of GPAs or percentages or other methods of assessment and evaluation of prospective applicants used in Western countries. As students only have one chance to take this test each year, there is an enormous amount of pressure to do well on this test, and the majority of senior high school education is dedicated to doing well on this single test. Japanese students are faced with immense pressure to succeed academically from their parents, teachers, peers, and society. This is largely a result of a society that has long placed a great amount of importance on higher education, and a system that places all of its weight upon a single examination that has significant life-long consequences towards one's socioeconomic status, promising marriage prospects, and a respectable white-collar professional career path.
Another major difference is graduate school, as very few non-science undergraduate students go to graduate school in Japan. This is because graduate schools for non-science students are generally considered useful only to those who want to work in academia. This has changed a little since the turn of the 21st century. The law has changed to require those who want to become lawyers to attend a graduate school the Japanese government has designated a law school. Previously, lawyers only had to pass the bar exam, which undergraduate students could take. Major universities have also opened business schools, though few Japanese students attend these because most Japanese corporations still don't regard graduate students as much more qualified than undergraduate students. For this reason, they are mostly attended by foreign students from neighboring East Asian countries, particularly South Korea, Taiwan, and China. Unlike higher education in some other countries, public universities are generally regarded as more prestigious than private universities, especially the National Seven Universities.
As the Japanese economy is largely scientific and technological based, the labor market demands people who have achieved some form of higher education, particularly related to science and engineering in order to gain a competitive edge when searching for employment. According to the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology , the percentage of Japanese going on to any higher education institution in the eighteen-year-old cohort was 80.6 percent, with 52.6 percent of students going on to a university, 4.7 percent to a junior college, 0.9 percent to a college of technology and the remaining 22.4 percent attending a correspondence school, the University of the Air or a specialized training college.