A study of the “environments” of Japanese universities

A limitation of most past studies of university environments is that they have been restricted to institutions in the United States. Accordingly, as a first step in providing a broader context for such studies, this study applied two approaches to the measurement of environments to 124 Japanese universities: factor analysis of statistical data and classification of faculties according to Holland's personality typology. Both procedures yielded a reasonably clear and meaningful pattern of results that was generally similar to the pattern of results in the United States, but with differences that appear related to the organization of higher education in Japan. More generally, the results tend to support the conclusions that size, wealth, and technical emphasis are key dimensions for describing universities, and that an organization can be measured through a census of its personality types.