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Seven Years Later

Matsue National College of Technology

We're going to tell you the story of an investigation. Every research project has a beginning. It starts with a question, an idea or a need.

Our project started with a question. We had seen the results from a survey done by the Institute of Colleges of Technology in 2005. In that survey, the Institute asked employers to compare Kosen graduates with university graduates. Many of you teachers here will remember that survey. Here are some of the results. We have summarized the key areas. As you can see, Kosen graduates compared very well in some areas but not in others. These communication results were not so good. We know that the schools in the Kosen system took these results seriously, so steps were taken to address the problems. So our question was; “What would the employers say now?”

It seemed like a good question. But then we thought there was an issue. We didn't think we could survey employers. But in the same year, graduates of Matsue Kosen had been asked what they thought of their education. “How did it compare with university education?” So we had a second question. In 2012, what do graduates of Matsue Kosen think about their education?

This seemed to be a better idea. We could survey graduates from our own school. So, we had a question, but we needed an aim for the study.

Our aim was to find out if there had been any change in graduates' opinion of their Matsue Kosen education, when they compared it to the education of university graduates they work or study with. Then we had an objective.
The next question was to decide how we were going to do the study. We thought that was easy. We had the results of the 2005 survey, so we'd just ask recent graduates the same questions.

We'd get the email addresses of recent graduates and send out the questionnaires. This was when we met our first problem. Collecting email addresses was much more difficult than we had thought. With some help, we finally got 100 email addresses and we sent out this questionnaire. But after ten days we had only ten responses!

The problem was that some of the email addresses didn't work any more and some of the addresses were for cell phones. We had to think of another plan, so we set up a web site with the questionnaire and tried again. We got a few more responses so we kept going. Finally we had some data and we plotted it.

Here are the results. And here is the comparison with the 2005 results. They looked a lot different so we thought the project was looking good.
But we had to analyze the results. What did they really mean? We needed to know if there was a real difference between 2005 and 2012. Even though there was a big difference in some categories, we had to ask ourselves if it was valid.

The problem with statistics, especially with comparisons, is whether the two populations are the same.

Our two populations were a bit different. For example, population size. The 2005 survey had 245 responses. Even after all our efforts, we only had 20 responses.
There was another difference. The graduates who answered in 2005 were mostly out working. The responses we got in 2012 came from about 50% people out working and 50% from people at university. It was hard to say if we could really compare the results, but we thought they must mean something. We struggled with this, but we think that even if our comparison doesn't have true statistical validity, the results are indicative.

In 2012 respondents thought their creativity was about the same as their university peers, but maybe their education in humanities was better. But look at the communication and presentation skills. This was a big turn around. In 2005 Matsue graduates felt very inferior, but in 2012, 80% of respondents felt equal or superior in this category.

We know these results are only indicative but it's a positive trend.

These comparisons are only from our school but we know that other schools in the Kosen system have been doing the same things.

So we think it shows that the Colleges of Technology are moving in the right direction.

Let's go back to the beginning of this investigation Our starting point was the Institute survey. This was the survey we felt we couldn't do.
It's a pity the questions aren’t exactly the same, but if we group some categories, we can get an idea. Here's a comparison of the two surveys in 2005.
If we add in the 2012 results, does this show that if the Institute repeated their survey now, these results here would be different?

We would like to think so.

Communication skills are so important. It’s no good being a good engineer if you can't communicate. Whether it's in English or Japanese we have to be able to express ourselves. So the education in the Colleges of Technology needs to keep moving onwards and upwards and we need to move along with it.