Overview of the ACE Program

What is the ACE Program?

Rikkyo University’s ACE Program is one of the programs chosen by MEXT for inclusion in the Inter-University Exchange Project: Support for the formation of Collaborative Programs with Universities in Asia. With MEXT providing financial support, Rikkyo University, Seoul National University, Peking University and National University of Singapore are forming and jointly operating an international inter-university consortium.

“ACE” stands for The Asian Consortium for Excellence in Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Education. The aim of the ACE Program is to take liberal arts education as the foundation for cultivating human talent that is capable of thinking seriously about, and taking action to address, the various issues facing Asia and the global community as a whole in today’s world, through collaboration that involves multi-faceted collaboration between students living and studying in the Asian cultural ecumene, which is rich in both shared features and diversity, and other inhabitants of the region, in a manner that transcends both the boundaries between academic disciplines and geographical boundaries. In principle, all teaching, etc. in the program is conducted in English. The partners of the individual universities that have signed up to the ACE Program are all faculties that emphasize liberal arts education, or in other words, a wide-ranging general education. Rikkyo University, which is one of Japan’s leading universities, has taken liberal arts education as its foundation ever since the university was first established in 1874. Through the ACE Program, which seeks to incorporate, as part of the undergraduate curriculum, the finest liberal arts education available in individual Asian countries, Rikkyo University aims to provide students with opportunities to grow into “global leaders, with their roots in Asia, working together to build the future,” who will have acquired wide-ranging perspectives and ideas regarding various aspects of global society, as well as learning ways to solve problems.