Why Does ‘Academic-Background Mockery’ Appeal to Teenagers?
What wakatte.TV reveals about a society that cannot call studying an effort
Grades and university destinations shape young people’s futures. Yet students who take study seriously may be mocked as swots or status obsessives. Why does this contradiction draw teenagers toward academic-ranking content? Bourdieu, Honneth and Sandel offer three answers.
Disgust at “a show that mocks students”
On August 3, 2026, Professor Okazaki of Kyushu University’s Faculty of Law posted on X about wakatte.TV. He wrote that he felt strong disgust at a format that mocks students according to the admissions difficulty of their universities.
The performers are free to exaggerate their own academic credentials, he argued, but involving large numbers of applicants and university students in the act is something he could not overlook as a member of a university community. Professor Okazaki’s post
In response to the discussion, another post offered a hypothesis about wakatte.TV’s popularity among junior-high and high-school students:
Perhaps it succeeds because society places great weight on academic credentials while rarely recognizing “studying” as a form of effort.
The two posts point to different problems.
The first asks whether it is ethical to turn students into objects of ridicule on the basis of a university name.
The second asks what kind of society makes young people want such a program.
wakatte.TV officially describes itself as a show that uses dark humour to satirize Japan’s credential-oriented society. wakatte.TV official website
But the creators’ intention to produce satire can coexist with viewers learning to treat the hierarchy of universities as real.
The question is not only whether satire excuses the format or whether people who dislike it should stop watching.
Why do students preparing for entrance exams keep watching academic-ranking content that could also wound them?
Credentials matter, yet caring about them is ridiculed
Academic credentials do not determine everything in Japanese life.
But neither are they irrelevant to employment and wages.
In a 2025 survey by Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, the average monthly wage for regular workers was ¥297,200 among high-school graduates and ¥396,300 among university graduates. Among new graduates, the figures were ¥207,300 and ¥262,300 respectively. Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, 2025 Basic Survey on Wage Structure
Those figures alone do not prove that university attendance causes the wage difference. Occupation, age, family background and many other conditions also matter.
Even so, a teenager’s sense that educational destination affects future options is not merely imaginary.
Society tells students to take their future course seriously.
At the same time, it may mock those who spend long hours studying as people who have sacrificed their youth or who are intelligent but dull. Athletic practice is readily narrated as effort; hours at a desk are less visible from the outside.
The result is a peculiar contradiction.
Society values the outcome called an academic credential without necessarily treating the studying that produces it as an effort worthy of respect.
Academic-ranking content then offers applicants a kind of assurance:
The university hierarchy you worry about really does exist.
The studying you are doing now is not meaningless.
Teenage viewers may not be seeking only permission to look down on someone else.
They may want someone to acknowledge that the time they are spending has meaning.
Honneth: what young people seek is recognition
The German philosopher Axel Honneth argues that people need recognition from others in order to develop a positive relationship with themselves.
It is not enough to be respected as an equal person with rights. People also need their abilities and activities to be valued as socially significant. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Recognition”
Applied to entrance examinations, this idea reveals part of wakatte.TV’s appeal.
Most of the effort involved in exam preparation is invisible while it is happening.
The slight improvement in a practice-test result and the hours spent memorizing English vocabulary while fighting sleep are difficult for other people to see. The name of the university that admits someone, however, can be communicated in a single phrase.
A university name becomes a certificate through which society recognizes previously invisible effort.
Academic-ranking content reads the value of that certificate aloud.
By celebrating admission to highly selective universities in exaggerated terms, it recognizes the applicant’s effort. Such recognition can indeed motivate someone to keep studying.
But it creates a serious problem.
If praise rests entirely on a university hierarchy, elevating one person requires lowering another.
This is not recognition of effort. It is recognition of winners.
The work done by those who fail an exam, change direction or lack adequate study time because of family circumstances disappears together with the result.
A legitimate desire—“I want my effort to be recognized”—is converted into another desire: “I want to laugh at a university ranked below mine.”
That is the danger of academic-background mockery.
Bourdieu: a university name becomes cultural capital
The French sociologist and thinker Pierre Bourdieu described academic qualifications as an institutionalized form of cultural capital.
A degree grants socially recognized value to a person’s knowledge and competence. Qualifications make complex, difficult-to-compare abilities exchangeable and comparable. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital”
The world of wakatte.TV stages this exchange with extreme clarity.
As soon as a university name is heard, the performance decides whether to show respect, surprise or mockery.
Before learning what a person studies, thinks or does with their life, the university name supplies a social valuation.
Applicants can therefore watch the program not only as entertainment but also as a market-price list for university names.
This is not a simple story about young people being brainwashed by credentialism.
In a society where a university name can affect hiring and evaluation, learning the rules is rational in one sense.
But Bourdieu also warns against explaining examination results solely through individual effort.
Family income, parents’ education, access to tutoring and materials, a quiet place to work, and the information available about university admissions are not distributed equally before competition begins.
A 2025 survey by Japan’s National Institute for Educational Policy Research likewise found that groups with lower socioeconomic backgrounds tended to record lower achievement across subjects. Background does not mechanically determine a result, but the competition does not begin from perfectly equal positions. National Institute for Educational Policy Research
If admission is nevertheless attributed entirely to effort and rejection entirely to laziness, social inequality is translated into individual responsibility.
wakatte.TV did not create Japan’s credential-oriented society.
It presents an existing exchange rate for academic credentials in its most vivid and provocative form.
That is why criticizing the program alone leaves intact the social structure that produces its popularity.
Sandel: the pride of winners requires the humiliation of losers
The American political philosopher Michael Sandel has examined the dark side of meritocracy, a system that allocates positions according to ability and effort.
There is nothing irrational about assigning a demanding job to someone who has the abilities it requires.
The problem begins when winners believe that success is entirely their own achievement and infer that those who lost occupy their position because they failed to work hard enough.
For Sandel, meritocracy produces hubris among winners and humiliation among losers. Michael Sandel, “The Dark Side of Meritocracy”
Academic-background mockery completes this structure as comedy.
People with prestigious credentials are celebrated as winners through effort.
Students at universities judged less selective are laughed at as losers in the competition.
Even a viewer who has not yet taken the examination can temporarily join the side of the winners. Simply aiming for a highly selective university can create a sense of belonging to the superior group.
The laughter may drive an applicant to study.
Fear of being mocked in the future can be a powerful motivation.
But making someone act is not the same as acting rightly.
In a society where people study to escape humiliation, admission does not end anxiety. Comparisons soon resume through university grades, employers, income and job titles.
As long as recognition is sought within a hierarchy, someone else must be placed below us.
Whom does the satire make us laugh at?
wakatte.TV satirizes Japan’s credential-oriented society by having its performers play deliberately exaggerated devotees of academic hierarchy.
It would therefore be inaccurate to treat every statement made by a performer as the program’s literal position.
Its videos can also introduce universities and student life, giving useful information to prospective applicants.
Still, calling the performers characters does not remove the program’s effects.
What satire criticizes depends not only on the creators’ explanation but also on the person at whom the audience ultimately laughs.
If viewers laugh at the foolishness of judging people by credentials, the performance satirizes credentialism.
If they laugh at students attending less selective universities and remember only the hierarchy, the satire reproduces the value system it claims to criticize.
A ranking performed repeatedly can become social common sense for viewers even when it is presented as a joke.
The boundary between satire and participation is not settled by declaring, “This is only a joke.”
Recognize studying without ranking human beings
It is easy to answer Professor Okazaki’s criticism by saying that people who dislike the program should not watch it.
It is equally simplistic to assume that closing the program would abolish credentialism.
wakatte.TV’s popularity exposes the contradiction of a society that publicly disavows concern with academic background while continuing to use credentials in education and employment.
The answer is not to ban discussion of academic credentials.
It is to recognize studying as effort without converting its outcome into the total value of a human being.
Admission to a highly selective university is a major achievement.
It does not mean that the successful applicant has become a superior kind of person.
Likewise, rejection or another educational path does not prove an absence of effort or an inferior character.
Applicants need more than a promise that admission to a higher-ranked university will earn other people’s respect.
They need confidence that what they learned and the time they spent will be respected regardless of the result.
The problem with academic-ranking content is not that it discusses credentials.
It is that the moment a university name is heard, every other source of a person’s value disappears from sight.
This question
If humiliation over academic background drives young people to study, should we call that education?
Do we want to promise applicants that reaching the top will let them join the people who laugh?
Or do we want a society in which the effort of learning is respected whatever the result?
References
- Professor Okazaki’s post on X
- X post on wakatte.TV’s popularity
- wakatte.TV official website
- Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, 2025 Basic Survey on Wage Structure (Japanese)
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Recognition”
- Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital”
- National Institute for Educational Policy Research, 2025 national achievement survey summary (Japanese)
- Michael Sandel, “The Dark Side of Meritocracy”
Facts were checked as of August 6, 2026. The thinkers cited did not discuss wakatte.TV; their ideas are applied here to the question raised by the program.