Recently, many universities and colleges have introduced "first-year experience"(FYE) or "first-year seminar"(FYS) to lead students to their success in college life. This trend is mainly due to a rapid decrease in 18 years of student population and the subsequent dramatic transition from "mass" to "universal" higher education in Japan. In addition, the amendment to the Standards for Establishment of Universities in 1991 strongly encouraged higher education institutions in Japan to be transformed. The establishment of the Japan Association for Developmental Education (JADE) in 2006 and the establishment of the Japanese Association of First-Year Experience at Universities and Colleges (JAFYE) in 2008 are good examples of approaches to deal with these situations surrounding Higher Education in Japan. However, there are still several unresolved issues left to deal with, and the transformations of many higher education institutions in Japan is "even now being developed."
This paper tries to describe a path toward the future of first-year experiences or first-year seminars in Higher Education Systems in Japan by reviewing and discussing studies and researches presented so far. The United States has a long history of first-year seminars prior to Japan. Accordingly, at the beginning of first-year seminars many challenges to first-year seminars in Higher Education in the United States were taken as a model in many cases. Therefore, this paper has a brief overview of the history and the present situations of first-year seminars in Higher Education in the United States and then traces the history and the present situations of first-year seminars in Higher Education in Japan as well. Then, this paper attempts to identify some issues which seem to be required to build better first-year seminar systems in university education curriculums in Japan by comparisons and examinations of the situations of the two counties and by some experiential intuition based on the author's educational activities and professional experiences.
