Japan Forum

In what will almost certainly make scores of otaku nationwide fall into an apoplectic fit, Philadelphia's Temple University, the oldest and largest foreign college to set up shop in Japan, is offering a two-month expert-taught summer session this year in the broad field of Japanese pop culture. The session is composed of part language study and part socio-anthropological analysis of contemporary trends in Japanese pop culture and will apparently include field trips on top of lectures. A few familiar faces round out the Temple Tokyo faculty who will be teaching these courses, including Patrick Galbraith ( The Otaku Encyclopedia) and Roland Kelts ( Japanamerica). Ah, to be young and a student again.
 
There are some caveats, of course. First, students are required to take three courses and the tuition for this nine- or ten-unit program ranges from $5,850 to $6,500, so you'd better start selling lemonade on the street, like, last week. Next, there's no indication that price includes anything but the tuition, so expect to pay more for housing and airfare. Finally--and this is a big one--Temple's site doesn't make it clear whether  this program is available for anyone other than Temple students or those of their affiliates.
 
Get the lowdown on details at Temple's site here and let us know, if you had the cash (and admission was open to all), would you go, or are you educated enough from where you are?

That sounds like fun-- but for those prices I feel like a trip to Japan should be included =P College is so damn expensive!

@gia said:

"That sounds like fun-- but for those prices I feel like a trip to Japan should be included =P College is so damn expensive! "

Yep and I thought uni was expensive here in Canada. Boy am I wrong. I usually end up paying somewhere around $7000 for electrical engineering and part of that is being charged extra since the curriculum for any of the programs in the faculty of engineering requires more credits (ie. courses) than the upper limit of a full unit course year (30 units and engineering programs varies from 35 on the low end to 40 on the high) and so an extra charge is placed for exceeding a full unit course load by over a set limit of units. 
 
I know Japan is expensive for everything and post-secondary in the United States is fairly crazy but 10 credits for around $6000 is pretty crazy. 
 
Although than again post secondary education is the responsibility of the provincial government not federal. So it could be more expensive outside of here (Ontario) if the province doesn't allocate as much funding but I'm pretty sure tuition is about the same everywhere. Also the majority of post-secondary education institutes be it a college or university is public. Private education (besides a few with ties to some kind of form of Christianity) is fairly new and the only private university is Quest University in BC, which is very small and only opened a couple years ago.  
 
Seeing how ridiculously expensive most private post-seconday institutions are down south I think this is a good thing. Having education payed for via taxes would be great although I think people may not take their classes as seriously then without some kind of monetary weight to it. That and it would mean having to find a method for charging international students since they wouldn't be paying taxes due to not being a citizen or permanent resident.  (INB4 socialist commie hippie)
 
(Sorry to get somewhat off-topic)