Differences in between technical colleges and institute of technology in Japan, from the viewpoint of their educational objectives

The purpose of this study is to clarify the differences of educational objectives between national technical colleges and national institutes of technology. This was achieved by using the text mining method. We collected text data from the educational objectives of all technical colleges and all institutes of technology websites. Words that appeared most frequently in the text data were listed for the both groups, technical-colleges group (TCG) and institutes of technology group (ITG). First, the appearance probability of each word was calculated. Only the word, “engineer”, had the probability gap of more than 1 %. The word was frequently appeared in TCG. Second, the Chi-square test was used to select the distinguishing words and 10 most distinguishing words were found. “Research / Graduation research”, “Progress / improvement / growth”, “Talent / human resource”, “Society / social environment”, “Contribution”, and ”Technology / science” were distinguishing words for ITG and “Engineer”, “Acquire”, “Practical / practical skills”, and “Information technology / information processing” were for TCG. Obviously, institutes of technology are aiming improvement and progress of society and science through their research. On the other hand, the purpose of technical colleges is to nurture the practical engineering for industry.