Once a “voracious consumer” of American higher education, Japan’s student enrollment in U.S. universities is steadily declining, the Washington Post reports. “Undergraduate enrollment [from Japan] in U.S. universities has fallen 52 percent since 2000; graduate enrollment has dropped 27 percent.” A principal reason for this decline seems to be that an American degree in Japan is no longer as prized as it once was by students and employers the article characterizes as increasingly “inward-looking”:

At big Japanese companies, many bosses don't like what they see as the sometimes uppity and overly independent ways of American-educated young Japanese, said Tomoyuki Amano, chief executive of Tomorrow Inc., which publishes a magazine about foreign education.

Amano said many employers prefer the ‘harmony’ that comes from hiring the locally educated, who they believe work longer hours, complain less, and request fewer vacations.