Nagasaki Wesleyan University (長崎ウエスレヤン大学 Nagasaki uesureyan daigaku) is a private university in Isahaya, Nagasaki, Japan. The predecessor of the school was the Cobleigh Seminary School founded in 1881 at Higashi-yamate in Nagasaki, which was founded as a missionary project of the Methodist Church. In 1906 the institution was renamed Chinzei Gakuin, and the institution was chartered as a junior college in 1966. In 2002 it became a four-year college. [1]
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Nagasaki Wesleyan University specializes in social work and social welfare education. The institution seeks to promote a broader concept and deeper understanding of social-welfare, global communication and community relationships, based on a foundation of human service. To promote this goal, all students are expected to engage in some sort of service learning activity as a graduation requirement.
The university has a distinctive international outlook. When still a junior college in the early 1980s, several teachers at the school contacted colleges and universities in the United States, the Philippines, Thailand and other countries in an effort to establish sister-school ties and promote student and faculty exchanges. A network of such ties was established, and over the years from roughly 1983 to 1999, several hundred Japanese students from Wesleyan studied abroad for a full year, while hundreds of other students transferred to foreign institutions to complete a baccalaureate degree. This transfer program was dropped when Wesleyan became a four-year institution, but still many students go abroad for exchange study, while hundreds of foreigners (mainly Chinese and Koreans) come to Nagasaki Wesleyan to study Japanese language and culture.
Like many universities in Japan and elsewhere, changing demographics and a recession economy have had a negative impact on Nagasaki Wesleyan. The simple fact that the number of 18-year-olds is declining every year means that there is tremendous competition among institutions to attract these traditional students. Wesleyan has therefore adopted the practice of heavily recruiting students from China and Korea. In addition, the institution now actively courts non-traditional students within Japan, especially retirees and homemakers from families where the children are themselves in college or otherwise out of the home. Whether these efforts will succeed in buoying up the institution in hard economic times has yet to be determined.