Migration, Ethnicity, and the Educational Gradient in the Jakarta Mega-Urban Region: A Spatial Analysis

Abstract

The Jakarta mega-urban region (MUR) is one of the largest such regions in the world. In this article, we revisit Castles’s seminal 1967 article, based on the 1961 Population Census of Indonesia, on the educational and ethnic composition of Jakarta. Using data from the full-count 2010 Population Census, we examine spatial patterns in the educational gradients of the population across the Jakarta MUR and look to determine whether these patterns can be explained by internal migration and ethnic composition at the kecamatan (subdistrict) level. We find that population movement from the core to the outer areas has softened the historically extremely sharp gradation in educational attainment across the MUR. We show the dominance of the Sundanese and Bantenese ethnic groups in the rural hinterlands of the MUR, where the average educational attainment is relatively low, and note this question of rurality versus ethnicity when interpreting our results.

Wilayah mega-urban (MUR) Jakarta adalah salah satu daerah urban terbesar di dunia. Dalam tulisan ini, kami menilik kembali tulisan seminar Castles pada tahun 1967 yang menggunakan Sensus Penduduk Indonesia 1961 untuk menganalisis komposisi pendidikan dan etnis di Jakarta. Menggunakan data dari Sensus Penduduk 2010 yang lengkap, kami menelaah pola spasial dalam gradien pendidikan dari populasi penduduk MUR Jakarta dan mempelajari apakah pola ini dapat dijelaskan oleh migrasi internal dan komposisi etnis pada tingkat kecamatan. Kami menemukan bahwa pergerakan penduduk dari daerah tengah kota ke pinggiran telah mengurangi gradasi yang biasanya tajam, dalam pencapaian pendidikan di wilayah MUR. Kami menunjukkan dominasi etnis Sunda dan Banten di daerah pedalaman pedesaan MUR, dimana rerata tingkat pencapaian pendidikan relatif rendah. Kami memberi catatan tentang karakteristik perdesaan versus etnisitas saat menginterpretasikan hasil kami.

Keywords:

• education
• demography
• urban growth
• internal migration
• ethnicity

JEL classification:

• J11
• R11

Notes

1 We follow the official census website of Badan Pusat Statistik, Indonesia’s central statistics agency, in translating kota as ‘municipality’. See, for example, http://sp2010.bps. go.id/index.php/site?id=3271000000&wilayah=Kota-Bogor.

2 Such a proposition is in line with, for example, Buchmann and Hannum’s (2001) article, which suggests that ethnic-based educational inequality is an important aspect of regional social and economic stratification in developing nations, and Baldwin and Huber’s (2010) cross-country study, which finds a significant relation between ethnic differences in economic outcomes and the provision of public goods.

3 Of the 1.8 million people aged five and older living in rural areas of the MUR during the 2010 census, only 22,000 (1.2%) were migrants, a much lower proportion than in the urban population (9.7%).

4 The levels of education of the Betawi are well above the average at the national level but somewhat below the average at the Jakarta level. The reason for this apparent discrepancy is that the great majority of Betawi in Indonesia live in the Jakarta MUR, while very few of them live in rural areas. Since rural levels of education in Indonesia are well below urban levels, the Betawi perform much better in national comparisons than in those restricted to the Jakarta MUR.

5 Some groups are more concentrated in particular parts of Jakarta. An example is the Madurese, whose educational levels are very low; they are heavily concentrated in North Jakarta but make up only 2.2% of its population.

6 The findings of previous studies on the intergenerational patterns of education in Indonesia support this proposition. Using data from different rounds of the Indonesia Family Life Survey, Mare and Maralani (2006) found a positive association between women’s education and the level of their children’s education. At the population level, the positive intergenerational effect of women’s education was found to be moderated by the reduction in the number of children born to more educated women, but enhanced by education homogamy. In a study of young adults who had dropped out of school in Greater Jakarta, a father’s education was found to be a strong predictor of his children’s returning to school (Utomo et al. 2014).

7 See Elmhirst’s (2002) study on the dynamics of young women’s outmigration from Lampung.

8 Another important historical explanation behind low educational levels in the periphery of Greater Jakarta is the rapid increase in the number of uneducated migrants from rural West Java between the 1930s and the 1950s. The recent work of Huff and Huff (2015) showed that during and after the Second World War, there were substantial movements of population to urban centres in many Southeast Asian cities, including Jakarta and Surabaya. Huff and Huff suggested that key factors behind these movements included the provision of food rations in urban areas, which attracted rural migrants facing food scarcity, and fear and safety reasons, owing to insurgencies and political instability after the war.

9 For a detailed historical analysis, see Kartodirdjo’s (1966) study.