Study

More of you will work twenty hours a week than will study twenty — until you reach graduate school

The survey asks how many hours you work. Separately, it asks how many hours you study outside class. Line the two answers up against the same group of students and the balance tips one way at a vocational school and the exact opposite way at a doctoral programme. The crossing point is the undergraduate degree.

There is a question in JASSO's survey that gets almost no attention, and it is the most revealing one in the document. It asks students how many hours a week they spend on study and research outside of class time. Not attendance. Homework, reading, lab work, thesis work — the part of studying that is up to you.

Here is what 7,867 international students answered:

Two students in five are under fourteen hours a week — 40.1% of them. That is two hours a day, and 7–14 hours is the single most common answer in the survey.

Which raises the question the survey does not connect for you: how does that compare with the time the same students spend at work?

Putting the two questions side by side

These are different tables with different denominators, so the comparison takes one step of arithmetic. The working-hours table only counts students who have a job; the study-hours table counts everyone. To compare them we converted both back to counts of students and divided by the same total.

Take Japanese language schools. There are 2,470 students in the survey. 1,701 of them have a job, and 1,227 of those work twenty hours a week or more. So 1,227 out of 2,470 — 49.7% — are working twenty-plus hours. In the same group, 656 students study twenty-one hours or more outside class. That is 26.6%.

Do that for every level and the pattern is not subtle:

At a vocational school, working long hours is nearly twice as common as studying long hours. At a doctoral programme it is eight times less common. The two lines cross at the undergraduate degree, where they are close to level — 20.4% against 32.1%.

Two honest caveats

First, the thresholds are not identical. The survey's bands put the work cut at twenty hours and the study cut at twenty-one, because those are the boundaries it uses. We could not make them match without inventing data. The gaps in the table are far too large for one hour to explain, but it is one hour of slack in favour of the work column.

Second, class time is missing from the study side entirely. A language school student is in class as well, and this table does not see those hours. What it measures is the time each group has discretion over, and how that time gets used. Read it as "what do you do with the rest of your week", not as "how hard do you study".

The one place the scholarship shows up

We looked at this from the other direction in a separate piece: a scholarship barely changes whether a student works at all — 62.4% of recipients have a job against 66.8% of non-recipients, a difference of four and a half points.

But it does change the study hours. JASSO splits the study-time table by scholarship status and the gap is consistent:

The same gap shows up level by level rather than only in the totals. At an undergraduate degree, 12.7% of funded students are in the under-seven-hours group against 16.1% of unfunded ones; at a vocational school, 14.4% against 20.5%.

So the money does not buy time off work. It buys time on study. Those are not the same trade, and the survey cannot tell us which way the causation runs — whether the funding frees up the hours, or whether the students who already study hard are the ones who win the funding.

What to do with this before you choose

If you are choosing between a language school and a route that starts at a university, the tuition difference is the part everyone compares. This table is the part nobody does.

• At a language school or vocational school, the realistic week has around twenty hours of paid work in it, and the study you do outside class fits around that. Half the students there are living exactly this.
• At an undergraduate degree, the two are roughly balanced, and which one dominates is genuinely up to you.
• At graduate level, the work hours mostly disappear — because the scholarship rate more than quadruples, not because graduate students are more disciplined.
• If you are planning a language school year followed by a degree, expect the shape of your week to change completely at the transition, in both directions at once.

Sources. Japan Student Services Organization (JASSO), FY2023 Survey on Living Conditions of Privately Financed International Students. Table 9-1 (hours of study and research outside class, by level; 7,867 respondents), Tables 9-2 and 9-3 (the same, split by whether a scholarship is received), Table 8-2 (share with a job, by school), Table 8-5 (weekly hours worked, by level; 5,133 students with a job), Table 8-6 (job by scholarship status), Tables 6-2 and 6-3 (scholarship rates and amounts). Survey PDF (Japanese). The side-by-side table is our calculation, not JASSO's. We took the student counts from Table 8-5 and Table 9-1 and divided both by the same level totals. Worked example, Japanese language schools: 764 + 463 = 1,227 students working 20 hours or more, out of 2,470 → 49.7%; and 367 + 171 + 61 + 24 + 33 = 656 studying 21 hours or more, out of 2,470 → 26.6%. Junior colleges (70 students) and preparatory courses (107) are left out of the table because the samples are too small to carry a percentage.