The University of Tokyo

The University of Tokyo, my alma mater, is one of the top schools in Asia, so the graduates are expected to play a leading role in Japan. Unfortunately, its undergraduate male-female sex ratio is 8:2, and it has been stable over 20 years despite a general increase in women's access to higher education. I'm always wondering why the trend has been stalled and one of the hypotheses is that successful applicants to UTokyo are still dominated by graduates from boy's schools.

For instance, Kaisei high school, one of the most competitive private school in Tokyo, accounts for roughly 5% of freshmen enrolled in UTokyo each year. Also, among top 10 high schools in terms of the number of successful applicants to UTokyo, 7-8 are boys school.

In this sense, going to these competitive boys school brings a huge advantage for children to get into the nation's top university, so parents with higher educational aspirations for a child are eager to send their children to cram schools to pass an entrance exam for the schools.

Children usually take the exam at age 12, so I think it is their parents who mainly influence their decision to choose which schools to apply to. Against my intuition, most of my friends who graduated from top boys schools and UTokyo, told me that they chose the school.

Today I asked the same question to my friends with a similar background, and their answer was slightly different from what I've heard. One of my friends said, he chose the high school he graduated, but he followed suggestions from the cram school he attended and his parents.