Comparative analysis of research and development environment in the universities of Japan and the USA

When the decline of Japan's ability to compete is studied, the inferiority of Japanese universities is often listed as a factor. In this study, the authors compared Japanese universities with US universities from viewpoints of the number of doctoral candidates and the level of government funding for R&D. These two criteria are adopted in the Carnegie Classification. As a result, they found the following points; (1) the number of US research universities (125) is much higher than that the number of Japanese universities (16); (2) the share of graduate students among total students at US universities is higher than that at Japanese universities; and (3) the gap between US universities is larger than that among Japanese universities.