Chapter 8 - Access and Equity in Higher Education in Indonesia: A Review from the Periphery

Abstract

Higher education in Indonesia has steadily expanded since the enactment of the Education Act in 1961. This expansion has been reasonably uniform across the past four decades. Thus, the number of students grew continuously from around 200,000 students in 1975 to more than 4.5 million students by 2012. Widening access to higher education has become a top priority for governments in Indonesia and around the world. This has been achieved in numerous ways, for example: through an increase in government investment, by the rise of private providers of higher education, and overall increase in higher education providers. It is believed that equity and access in education are one of the key factors determining the success of national development, and both universities and governments can hardly afford to ignore issues that relate to equity and access to higher education. Therefore, access and equity are fundamental principles that are then measured regarding the success of their provision. This chapter has two major objectives. The first is to review trends of access and equity in Indonesian higher education. The second is to describe and analyze how government policies address the challenge of access and equity in higher education. The chapter is solely based on secondary information collected from different sources like policy documents, books, journal articles, reports of various government organizations, and articles published in national and local newspapers and on websites.