Indonesian universities in transition: catching up and opening up

Abstract

Indonesia's higher education system is changing rapidly: in 2010 there were about 5 million students, up from 2,000 in 1945. Effectively the tertiary system has four tiers, three of which are within the public sector. However, the system is increasingly private sector driven. The key themes of this paper on universities are rapid growth; overcoming the historical backlog; and the need for further fundamental reform. The quality of Indonesia's tertiary institutions is highly variable. Governance structures and incentives regimes within the state universities are complex and obscure. The government both over-regulates and under-regulates. Major reforms are under way and increasing financial resources are available.

Keywords:

• universities
• education quality
• accreditation

Acknowledgements

This paper draws on research that was commissioned by the Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID), but the views expressed are entirely those of the authors. For comments on an earlier draft and much assistance with the research, we wish to thank Diastika Rahwidiati, Idauli Tamarin, Scott Guggenheim, Siwage Dharma Negara, Mayling Oey-Gardiner, Peter Gardiner and Colin Brown; we also express our gratitude to the many people interviewed during fieldwork in Jakarta and Bandung in 2011.

Notes

¹For recent analyses of universities in a global (albeit mainly US) perspective, see Wildavsky (2010).

²Indonesia's education system comprises pre-school, six years of primary education, and three years each of lower and upper secondary education. At the tertiary level, there are diploma, bachelor, master and doctoral programs, with the first two of these taking from one to four years. Technical and vocational education and training (TVET) is an alternative to general education that can be undertaken at the secondary or the diploma level. For each level of education, a separate Islamic stream is also available.

³Unless otherwise indicated, this section draws on material presented in Di Gropello, Kruse and Tandon (2011). Other data are from the World Bank's World DataBank education statistics database, available at <http://databank.worldbank.org/data/home.aspx>, or from Index Mundi, available at <http://www.indexmundi.com/facts/indonesia/school-enrollment>.

⁴The net enrolment rate (NER) is the total enrolment of those in the appropriate age group for a given level (for example, 6–12-year-olds for primary level) as a percentage of the total population in that age group. The gross enrolment rate (GER) is the total enrolment at a given level, regardless of age, as a percentage of the population in the age group appropriate to that level. Hence the GER can be greater than 100% but the NER cannot.

⁵Both rankings use objective and subjective criteria. The THES rankings, which commenced in 2004, focus most heavily on international reputation. The SJTU rankings, which started in 2003, use objective indicators exclusively, related to the academic and research performance of faculty and alumni.

⁶UI's 1849 origins are based on the establishment in Jakarta in that year of the Dokter Jawa School (School tot Opleiding van Inlandse Artsen or Stovia, School for the Training of Indigenous Physicians), which eventually became the university's faculty of medicine in the late 1940s.

⁷During the period 1920–40, fewer than 1,500 Indonesian students had qualified to enter a tertiary institution; only 230 had graduated from Indonesian tertiary institutions; and just 344 had graduated from universities in the Netherlands (Booth 1989: 118).

⁸The OECD estimates appear to under-state the stock of Indonesian students abroad. Although accurate figures are not available, the number is thought to be about 60,000.

⁹The EU21 average is ‘the unweighted mean of the data values of the 21 OECD countries that are members of the European Union for which data are available or can be estimated. These 21 countries are Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, the Slovak Republic, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom’ (OECD2011a: 26).

¹⁰To quote Salmi (2009: 21), ‘tertiary education institutions in countries where there is little internal mobility of students and faculty are at risk of academic inbreeding’.

¹¹For example, two Indian institutions – the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi and the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IITB) – were placed in the top 150–200 in the THES 2008 ranking. This paragraph on India draws on OECD (2011b: ch. 5, ‘Building on progress in education’).

The most detailed study on the subject is World Bank (2010), which is the source for some of the statistics quoted in this section.

¹³The universities and institutes could of course be classified according to alternative criteria. For example, if quality were the main arbiter, the top group would include the elite state universities together with a small group, probably similar in number, of private institutions.

¹⁴ Di Gropello, Kruse and Tandon (2011: 190) provide the following explanation of the types of tertiary institutions. ‘Academies are legally defined as higher-education institutions that provide instruction in only one field; most offer diplomas and certificates for technician-level courses in applied science, engineering, or art at both public and private institutions. Advanced schools [sekolah tinggi] provide academic and professional university-level education in one particular discipline. Polytechnic schools are attached to universities and provide subdegree junior technician training. Institutes are those HEIs [higher education institutions] that offer several fields of study by qualified faculty and are ranked as universities with full degree-granting status. Universities are larger than institutes and offer training and higher education in various disciplines.’ These are unofficial definitions, and best seen as only a guide; for example, two ‘Institutes’, IPB and ITB, are larger than most universities.

¹⁵Those with at least a masters degree constitute 30% of state HEI and 11% of private HEI faculty.

¹⁶In the words of the World Bank (2010: 19), private institutions are ‘totally devoid of a research program and do not offer courses in fields thought to be essential for development in areas such as agriculture, forestry and public health’.

¹⁷In fact, the director general of Dikti, Djoko Santoso, has stated that about one-quarter of the country's higher education institutions are not actually accredited (Jakarta Post, 11/7/2011).

¹⁸We thank Shannon Smith for drawing our attention to these data. Since 1995 a larger, though till modest, number of Australian students have undertaken part of their tertiary studies in Indonesia under the auspices of an Australian support organisation known as ACICIS (Australian Consortium for ‘In-Country’ Indonesian Studies, <http://www.acicis.murdoch.edu.au/>).

¹⁹ Chatani (2012) presents comparative data on school-teacher salaries, concluding that those for Indonesia are low, even after adjusting for per capita income.

²⁰See Chapman (2005), by the originator of the scheme, for a detailed exposition of the principles behind such a loan-contingent facility. The contingency arises from the fact that students begin to repay the loan, as an income tax surcharge, only when their incomes exceed some threshold, such as average weekly earnings.