New program sends first students to prestigious overseas boarding schools

In view of the holistic education under the boarding system implemented during the early days at Keio, we established the new “Keio University Affiliated Schools Study Abroad Program,” in which we send selected students from our affiliated senior high schools to prestigious overseas boarding schools (the “Ten Schools” in the U.S. and the most prestigious public schools in the U.K.). This program offers our students the opportunity to form friendly rivalries with exceptional students from around the world, while living under the same roof.

Under this program, the fee to study abroad is fully covered by a scholarship, and when returning to school in Japan, students can generally advance to the next year without falling a year behind. In the 2014 school year, which was the first year to implement this program, we actively sought out students who were eager to try different learning styles. As a result, we selected one Shonan Fujisawa Senior High School student to study at Deerfield Academy in the U.S., one Keio Girls Senior High School student to study at the Taft School also in the U.S., and one more student from each school to study at Shrewsbury School in the U.K. At the end of August last year, these four second-year senior high school students went abroad as inaugural members of the program, and their new school life overseas started smoothly.

The dispatched students live together with local students in dormitories in two-person dorm rooms. They choose five to six subjects and, in elegant brick-built school buildings, participate actively in debate-style classes with about 12 students in each class. The students spend a lot of time working on their assignments, and some students take extra classes to discuss contemporary politics and the economy. Also, in gigantic and fantastic facilities unimaginable in Japan, they engage in sports and by all accounts are having an enjoyable and fulfilling time with no time to be homesick.

In the 2015 school year, in addition to sending one student to each of the three schools mentioned above, we plan to send a second-year student to Winchester College in the U.K., and one third-year student to Phillips Academy Andover in the U.S for a period of one year. These students can obtain a high school degree while studying abroad, return to the third year of their original Keio-affiliated high school, and with a six-month or one-year delay, they will have graduated from both high schools.
By getting a sense of the culture, upbringing, and way of thinking that is common in the U.K. and the U.S., we expect the dispatched students to learn to understand different cultures and develop a creative mind that enables them to identify problems and to solve them under their own power. Furthermore, when they return to Japan, by sharing their experience with their schoolmates and by building on their achievements, we truly believe that this new program will establish itself as a great opportunity for students not only to become good at speaking English, but to overcome cultural differences and become future leaders.