Your school

85.2% are satisfied with their school. Everything they are not satisfied with happens outside the classroom.

JASSO asks students to name what they are satisfied with about their school, and separately what they are dissatisfied with. Line the two lists up and a pattern appears that no prospectus would print: every item about teaching wins by a landslide, and the only three items that come out negative are all about the part of life that is not lessons.

The headline number is reassuring and almost useless. Asked how satisfied they are with the school they are enrolled at, 85.2% of 7,867 international students say satisfied or very satisfied. Only 3.8% say otherwise.

Numbers like that are what schools quote and they tell you nothing, because almost every satisfaction survey ever run produces them. The useful question is the next one: satisfied with what, and dissatisfied with what.

The survey asks both, as two separate lists, each capped at three answers, each a share of the same 7,867 students. Set one against the other and the schools' shape becomes visible.

The top three are not close. Teaching quality is named as a strength by more than five times as many students as name it a weakness. Japanese language classes and academic support behave the same way.

Then the list crosses zero, and it crosses it at a consistent place. Housing, mixing with Japanese students, and extracurricular activities are the only three items where more students complain than praise. None of them is a lesson.

The largest single complaint

Set aside the 46.2% who say they have no complaint at all, and the biggest one left is chances to mix with Japanese students, named by 20.0% — one student in five.

What makes this more than a grumble is that the same survey, elsewhere, shows the students are right. Asked where they actually meet Japanese people, the single most common answer is the part-time job at 25.4%, ahead of every channel the school organises. The complaint and the behaviour agree: students want the school to be where this happens, and it is not.

The clubs figure sits alongside it and points the same way. Extracurricular activities are the classic answer to "how do I meet people" — and they are named as a fault twice as often as a strength.

The one that is almost exactly balanced

Financial support scores 19.8% good against 17.9% bad — the only item on the list where the two are nearly equal. It is also the second-largest complaint in absolute terms.

That balance is what you would expect from something distributed unevenly rather than done badly. 44.0% of students in higher education receive a scholarship; at a Japanese language school it is 13.2%. A question that produces a near-tie is often measuring a division rather than a standard, and this one probably is.

Questions this makes worth asking a school

The value of a table like this is not in judging schools in the aggregate. It is that it tells you which questions are worth your time when you have a school on the phone, because it shows you where the variation and the disappointment actually live.

• How do international students here meet Japanese students? Not "is there a club" — what specifically happened last term. This is the largest complaint in the survey.
• What do you do about housing? Named as a fault slightly more often than as a strength, and the only material one on the negative list. Elsewhere in the survey, 48.7% of students were asked for a guarantor.
• Who here has a scholarship, and how did they get it? The near-tie in the table suggests the answer varies enormously between institutions.
• What happens when a student is ill? Support for everyday life is a positive item overall, at +12.0 — which means some schools do this well and it is worth finding out whether yours is one.

The three items at the top of the table — teaching, language classes, academic support — are the ones you probably planned to ask about. They are also the ones students are least likely to be disappointed by.

What to take from this

• The 85.2% satisfaction figure is real but not informative. Use the breakdown, not the headline.
• Academic quality is the strongest part of the offer and is rarely a complaint. If that is your only worry, the data is with you.
• The social side is where schools underperform their students' expectations — and the students' own behaviour, recorded separately, confirms it.
• Scholarships divide rather than disappoint. A near-even split usually means unequal access, not poor service.
• None of this describes your school. It describes where, on average, the gap between what students expected and what they got is largest — which is where your questions should go.

Sources. Japan Student Services Organization (JASSO), FY2023 Survey on Living Conditions of Privately Financed International Students. Table 4-5 (overall satisfaction with the school), Table 4-6 (what students are satisfied with), Table 4-7 (what students are dissatisfied with), Table 4-9 (where students mix with Japanese students), Table 6-2 (scholarship receipt by school type), Table 10-6 (guarantors). Survey PDF (Japanese). On the percentages. Table 4-5 is a single-answer question and totals 100%. Tables 4-6 and 4-7 allow up to three answers per student and are shares of all 7,867 respondents, so each list exceeds 100% and the items cannot be added together. On our calculation. The net column is the satisfied share minus the dissatisfied share for the same item, computed by us. JASSO does not publish it and does not endorse it. We have left out the "nothing" and "other" rows, which have no counterpart to subtract. On what is missing. The survey does not break these answers down by type of school, so we cannot tell you whether the complaint about mixing with Japanese students comes disproportionately from language schools, universities, or vocational schools. It would be useful to know and the published tables do not say.