I think being a professor is a great job with many perks a lot of people just dream about. I work only two days a week and I have more than 4 months of vacation in a year. When I retire, I’ll get a good retirement package. But if you look at me in the eye and ask “ Do you believe that you positively contribute to society? Honestly I am not sure and that is why I am leaving my position. I will leave my tenured job at the end of this semester to join Maikoya and lead the Museums and Cultural Experiences division in Tokyo and different parts of Japan where I believe I can influence peoples’ lives positively.

Generally speaking getting a tenure in Japan is easier as no one in Japan is fired because of bad performance (cultural and legal reasons). I was awarded the tenure-ship on the first day without publishing in any high level journal. During my first few years in academia, I was quite ambitious: organized many extra curricular activities for students and founded Japan’s largest all-English business competition (MCJ). It was all going well until I realized a few things that changed my mind completely. These were 1) I was making no impact on students’ lives 2) what we teach in most of our classes were studies that couldn’t be replicated and 3) exams felt like short-term memory tests.

1- University coursework and getting a job in Japan

Since almost half the Japanese population is older than 50, every year so many people retire and companies hire almost any college grad not necessarily because he or she is qualified but because those retirees’ positions need to be filled. Even though I teach at an avg. level public uni, 100% my students have their jobs secured 1 year before their graduation. I also noticed that even though our school focuses on “cultural studies and languages” many students get jobs as “IT specialists” and “financial investors,” without taking any finance or programming classes which is shocking to me.

So, I wanted to check how university courses actually impacted job hunting in Japan. I designed a study where I asked 70 senior students about their job hunting experiences (more than 30 questions including, gpa, major, height, weight, perceived attractiveness, body mass, language skills, internship, leadership, part-time job exp., study abroad exp., social skills, family type, etc. in addition to number of 1st level, 2nd level and final interviews). The results were mind blowing. The gpa and learned skills had zero effect on the job hunting success. For females, nothing predicted the results except the number of cover letters submitted, while for males, the leadership experience, the internship and part-time job experiences were significant. it was clear, Japanese employers, who usually provide lifetime employment, only cared about personality and loyalty, not knowledge or skills. They did not care about what students actually learned in school perhaps with the belief in mind, if you are smart and quick learner you can easily learn what we do OR things are changing so fast what you know now will be irrelevant 10 years later OR loyalty and motivation are more important than ability.

2- The replication problem and the textbooks we must use

It’s been known for a while that a huge number of well-known studies in social sciences cannot be replicated.This always makes me feel uncomfortable because the findings from those studies are what we teach in class. If I am teaching my students that giving mints to customers increases tips by 30%, and, if it cannot be replicated in real life, that means I am lying to my students.

Below is a question I ask both my Japanese students and foreign exchange students all the time. Textbooks suggest that Asians usually group cow with grass, and Westerners usually group the cow with chicken (because Asians are relationship oriented while Westerners focus on features/categories). I found over and over again that this is not true.





3- Exams measure short term memory, not knowledge or skills

I always wondered what score I would get on an exam I took 25 years ago in high school. Perhaps not high :) A few years back I wanted to see how much my global business class students remembered from the final they had just taken 2 months before. Most of the students had gotten As and I wanted to see if they could remember half of what I asked on the exam. Yes, as you guessed it right, they remembered almost nothing. I asked them 3 questions from the same exam that were answered correctly by all the students: GDP of Japan in USD, the meaning of OECD and Hofstede’s cultural dimensions. Nope, there was no answer this time even though only 8 weeks had passed. So, I naturally concluded that students just memorize things for exams, and they forget everything in a few weeks. After all, I dont even know if they need to memorize those things because they can retrieve the same information 24/7 through google, wikipedia in 5 seconds without even typing anything (siri, Alexa).

We tell ourselves that we are measuring students' “progress” by quizzes, midterms and finals but what we do is actually just measuring their short-term memory skills. Although, it is true that short term memory scores highly correlate with job performance, we do not need to measure it hundreds of times, just 1 measurement is enough (e.g. college entrance exam, a single aptitude tests).

What is next?

I am going to have to survive in real life when mistakes cannot be fixed by the backspace button or make up quizzes.

Is Being a Professor Good? Absolutely. Are universities necessary? Of course. I would definitely send my kids to college. It is just I personally could not figure out how I can utilize my position in social sciences to help society. If I ever figure it out, I wouldn’t mind teaching again but I have a precondition for myself: whatever I am teaching, it must be changing peoples’ lives in a positive way. What I wrote above are just my personal opinions and these conditions only apply to Japan. I have many professor friends and I am sure they are contributing to society significantly. I wish them best of luck.