Indonesia Education

Higher Education Finance and Cost-Sharing in Indonesia
(Updated April 2010) I. A Brief Description of Indonesia’s Higher Education Indonesia consists of 17,000 islands. It has a population of 240,271,522 (2009 est.) that comprises about 3,000 ethnic groups. The majority of the population is Muslim (86 percent). It gained its independence from the Netherlands in 1945, after 350 years of colonization. Bahasa Indonesia is its official language (CIA 2010). With a gross national income per capita of US$1,888 in 2008, Indonesia is considered a lower-middle-income country by the World Bank. Its unemployment in 2009 stood at 7.7 percent and its GDP grew by 4.5 percent. (CIA 2010) Public expenditure Indonesia’s expenditure on education as a percentage of GDP is 3.8 percent as of 2007, which is lower than the 8.1 percent in Malaysia and the 4.6 percent in Thailand, but higher than the 3.1 percent in the Philippines. Its expenditure on education as a percentage of total expenditure, 16.9 percent, is similarly low compared to Malaysia (27 percent) and Thailand (27 percent) and lower than the 20 percent required by the Constitution. In 2007, its public expenditure on higher education as a percentage of the education budget was about 23 percent (Wicaksono and Friawan 2008). Enrolment and equality Higher education in Indonesia was started in the end of 19th century with the establishment of medical education for indigenous doctors in Jakarta. Since independence, higher education experienced dramatic growth. In 1950, there were only 10 institutions of higher learning, with a total of 6,500 students. By 1970, the higher education sector had grown to include 450 private and state institutions enrolling 237,000 students. Over the 1990-1996 period, total enrolment in public universities doubled, while enrolments in private universities rose by one third. (Quality Education for All Young People, 2004). In 1995, there were 853,000 students in 52 public universities, 1,450,000 in 1,228...