Exploration of Higher Education Indicators and Universities´ Characteristics in Japan

In recent years, there have been important and immediate requirements to diagnose and improve the quality of higher education in Japan. In this paper, we applied principal component analysis to explore higher education indicators based on a published basic education database of Japanese national and public universities, including educational and research expenditure, number of faculties, and book circulation per student. The results suggest that the characteristics of the universities can be captured by two dimensions of composite indicators in terms of input resources. The characteristics of the universities have also been analyzed and shown based on the two indicators.