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