Each year, more than four million children are born in Indonesia. Given the right opportunities, practically all of them would be capable of finishing high school and going on to complete some type of higher education degree. If these degrees were from relevant, high-quality programmes, these graduates would likely begin their forty-plus years in the labour market, well equipped to find and excel at interesting and challenging work. A range of benefits would accrue to them as individuals. They could expect higher incomes, less unemployment, and advantages for taking care of the health and education of their children throughout their lifetimes.1
The Higher Education System
Higher education expansion in Indonesia is a result of increased high school graduation rates coupled with increased private and public spending. Growth has been significant in terms of student numbers, doubling between 2013 and 2019. The gross enrolment rate increased from around 29% in 2014 to around 34.6% in 2018.2
Indonesia has more than 4,600 higher education institutions (HEIs) that are predominantly private, diverse in terms of size, quality and focus, and not yet well known outside of Indonesia.3
The majority of these HEIs are regulated by either the Ministry of Education and Culture (MOEC) or the Ministry of Religious Affairs (MORA), with a few others regulated by other ministries, namely, the Ministry of Industry, Ministry of Health, and Ministry of Tourism. Coordination between ministries is weak, resulting in system fragmentation and incoherence. This paper primarily focuses on the system regulated by MOEC in which there were about 2.9 million students studying in 122 state universities in 2019, out of a total of about 7.9 million students in the national higher education system. The rest of these students study in private institutions or state non-university institutions (e.g., polytechnics, academies, etc.).
Thus, the private sector has accommodated most of the growth in the system — serving about 73% of higher education students — atypical on average for Asia where approximately 35% of students are enrolled in private HEIs.4
However, quality has not kept pace with quantity. If “quality” is defined as “fit for purpose”, the quality gaps in Indonesian higher education are shared by many such systems globally. But gaps are larger in Indonesia. There is no Indonesian HEI in the top 500 Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2020 although three made it to the top 500 of QS World University Rankings.5
There is also no Indonesian HEI in the top 1000 ARWU rankings.6
Given the large number of HEIs in Indonesia, these statistics do not reflect well on system quality. The university ranking systems are indicative of an overall quality issue and a system-wide ranking is informative regarding underlying issues and constraints. The 2019 U21 Ranking of National Higher Education Systems ranks Indonesia at 50 out of 50 national higher education systems.7
However, it needs to be emphasised that “last place” in this ranking is expected given the rather youthful age of the higher education systems and the economic status of Indonesia as a middle-income country.
Government Intentions
Government plans expressed in the Rencana Pembangunan Jangka Menengah Nasional 2020-2024 (RPJMN 2020-2024) — translated as National Midterm Development Plan — are ambitious and focus on strengthening human capital to support national competitiveness and productivity. A total of eight strategies that reflect policy direction are identified in the RPJMN 2020-2024:
- Strengthening HEI’s as a source of innovation, through establishment of Centres of Excellence.
- Partnership with industry and providing incentives for HEIs and industry to undertake strategic research and facilitate mobility of academics between HEIs and between HEIs and industry.
- Improving quality and usage of research through strengthening linkages with industry.
- Improving relevance through establishment of new study programmes that match curriculum with industry needs, widening access to certification, shortening waiting time before employment, and creation entrepreneurship programmes.
- Expanding endowment funds from the private sector and philanthropic community to increase access and quality of education.
- Implementing mission differentiation that covers three areas: research-intensive, teaching-intensive, and vocational.
- Increasing autonomy and accountability of HEIs.
- Improving the quality of private HEIs to support achievement of RPJMN targets.
In 2020, a new administration at the Ministry of Education and Culture launched a set of policy directives for the higher education sector, labelled “Kampus Merdeka” (autonomous campuses). The directives are intended to:
- Increase autonomy by encouraging existing HEIs to become autonomous, as well as allowing more leeway for universities to open new study programmes.
- Improve performance measures by simplifying the accreditation process and making reliable tracer studies compulsory.
- Provide more learning options for students, particularly by allowing them to turn out-of-class experience into credits.
- Facilitate stronger links between industry and HEIs, as well as between HEIs nationally and internationally.
- Introduce competition and potentially allow local HEIs to model best practices by inviting foreign universities to establish a presence in Indonesia.
Poor-quality education at any price is not a good investment, and its provision to those students less able to pay higher fees creates disparity and an opportunity cost for those who can least afford it.
Resource Issue
Of the 50 countries in the U21 ranking system, only 15 had a higher GDP than Indonesia in 2019.8 Indonesian HEIs in general are severely resource-constrained compared with their counterparts in comparative countries. Indonesia’s spending has been modest, at only around 3.7% of the country’s GDP, comparably low to its neighbouring countries such as Thailand, at 4%, and Malaysia, at 6%.9 GDP is higher in these two countries than Indonesia. During the past five years, the national education budget share for higher education has also declined, from 10% in 2015 down to 8% in 2019.
Policy Environment
Private providers absorbed more than 60% of the demand for higher education in Indonesia. Yet, the quality of private HEIs varies, just as the public HEIs, but on a larger scale. Government support for private HEIs is inadequate given their potential to help meet national higher education objectives in support of economic and social development. Poor-quality education at any price is not a good investment, and its provision to those students less able to pay higher fees creates disparity and an opportunity cost for those who can least afford it. The private higher education system needs to be mobilised through government intervention. Investment opportunities include: competitive grant systems to improve quality, incentivising mergers and acquisitions within and throughout the private HEI sector, and public-private partnerships.
Conclusion
There are multiple missions that HEIs should consider where it is commonly accepted that no HEI can be the champion for all missions due to resource and capacity issues, and also the advantages of specialising in fewer areas. Specialisation and focus on a limited range of study programmes can be one dimension of mission differentiation that reflects depth of academic strength and strength reputation. Currently, in Indonesia many HEIs’ objectives and operations are spread too thinly across different missions — for example, too many universities focus on research when they may be better suited to primarily focus on high-quality teaching.
Mission differentiation should provide a better investment plan. Financing policy, systems and investment planning, should be linked to achieving a more effective, efficient and balanced mission differentiation across the higher education sector, and based on the comparative advantages and capacity of individual HEIs.
SATRYO SOEMANTRI BRODJONEGORO
Satryo Soemantri Brodjonegoro is Emeritus Professor in Mechanical Engineering, Bandung Institute of Technology, Indonesia; and President of the Indonesian Academy of Sciences.
APRIL 2022 | ISSUE 10
State of the Region: The Commemorative 10th Issue
World Bank, “Tertiary Education in Indonesia: Directions for Policy”, June 2014, https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/20024.
Ministry of Research, Technology and Higher Education, Indonesia, 2019.
Ranking Web of Universities, “Indonesia”, July 2020, http://www.webometrics.info/en/Asia/Indonesia%20
Asian Development Bank, 2018.
Times Higher Education, “World University Rankings 2020”, accessed January 26, 2021, https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings/2020/world-ranking#!/page/0/length/25/sort_by/rank/sort_order/asc/cols/stats; QS Top Universities, “QS Top University Rankings: Who Rules?”, accessed January 26, 2021, https://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-university-rankings/2020.
ARWU, “Academic Ranking of World Universities 2019,” accessed January 26, 2021, www.shanghairanking.com/.
Universitas21, “U21 Ranking of National Higher Education Systems 2019”, accessed January 26, 2021, https://universitas21.com/what-we-do/u21-rankings/u21-ranking-national-higher-education-systems-2019.
