Higher Education and Inequality
Reading the Preamble to the 45th Constitution, hopefully, we will not forget that our goal of independence is not only to achieve prosperity but to realize social justice for all Indonesian people.
There are times when news about children from poor families who are successful in their education splashes on media pages.
Be they the son of a farmer who graduated cum laude or the son of a pedicab driver who earned a doctoral degree. The news goes viral, becomes a topic of conversation and gives many people the comfort that anyone could be anything in this country.
I choose to think differently. The fact that the news has gone viral shows that this phenomenon is not a common thing. This is, in fact, evidence that a child from a poor family who can become a scholar in Indonesia is more of an exception than the norm. In an ideal society, the socioeconomic status of parents should not be the main determinant of one's educational attainment.
Structural issues
Indonesia is a country with high inequality. Using data that is consistent between countries, even Frederick Solt, a researcher from the United, shows that Indonesia is among 20 percent of the world's most unequal places to live. One of the reasons is the rapidly increasing trend of inequality over the last two decades. Data from UNU-WIDER, a think-tank under the United Nations, shows that during this period, the increase in inequality in Indonesia was the fastest in the world.
In addition, it is also difficult for us to understand this fact, given the per capita income of the Indonesian population, which is almost Rp 60 million (US$4,192) per year (in 2020). This means that each family in Indonesia has an average income of almost Rp 20 million per month (per capita income multiplied by the average of four family members, divided by 12 months of the year). A high amount for the majority of the people of Indonesia.
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This figure is very unrepresentative because it is driven by the high income of the elite of the very rich in this country. This is quite a contrast to World Bank data, which actually shows that currently, 53 percent of Indonesia's population still lives below Rp 25,000 per day per person (the economic security level limit).
The exact cause of the increase in inequality is still a big question among economists and social scientists. However, whatever it is, it is definitely something that is structural in nature and with great power, considering it is neither easy nor fast for an income distribution to change significantly.
Henry Aaron, an American scientist, once said that observing inequality was like watching grass grow. Unlike watching stock prices or financial indicators, the movements of inequality are slow and take a long time. Considering that the increase in inequality in Indonesia over the past two decades has been quite high (reaching around 30 percent), it is very likely that the cause is something structural.
Social mobility (changes in people's socioeconomic status) is considered one of the factors capable of changing the portrait of inequality. Children of poor families who grow up to be in the middle class are examples of social mobility. In this case, education, especially higher education, is widely regarded as an effective instrument in increasing social mobility.
Over the past 13 years, Statistics Indonesia (BPS) data shows the phenomenon of expansion of access to higher education. In 2008, 4.1 million people in the workforce had a university education (4.1 percent of the total number of workers of 102 million). In 2021, that number will increase to 13.1 million workers (up 400 percent) or 10.2 percent of the total number of workers. This is something we should be grateful for because it means that more and more people can access higher education in Indonesia.
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However, whether this phenomenon of university expansion plays a role in increasing social mobility and reducing income inequality, we need to look at it more carefully. What is clear is the fact that during the same period, what happened was a fairly massive increase in inequality.
Theoretically, increasing access to higher education does not always have the potential to reduce inequality; in fact, the opposite can also happen. If only certain groups can get access to higher education, inequality will actually increase. This happens because the expansion of higher education only helps enlarge the elite group, especially if it is not followed by an increase in the income of the low-educated group. This is what in theory is called the compositional effect.
Data from the Indonesian Family Life Survey (IFLS) shows that only 7 percent of children whose parents were among the poorest 20 percent in 2000 could get higher education 14 years later. Meanwhile, those whose parents are in the richest 20 percent, 14 years later, almost 50 percent can get a tertiary education.
Thus, we can estimate that the expansion of higher education that occurred quite massively in the 2000s was mostly enjoyed by the elite group. Simply put, most of those who became rich were already rich before. This is supported by a study by Takahiro Akita from the International University of Japan, published in 2017 in the journal Social Indicator Research. It can be concluded that the expansion of higher education, especially in urban areas, plays an important role in increasing inequality in Indonesia.
In addition, another factor that may play a role is the increasing wage gap between highly educated and non-educated workers. Research that I conducted in a recent global study under the coordination of UNU-WIDER showed that during the period of 2010-2015, the rate of return from access to higher education (in the form of additional wages) increased much more rapidly than the returns from primary and secondary education.
This widens the wage gap between workers and contributes to a general increase in inequality. In short, the expansion of higher education, if only enjoyed by a few people and not followed by a reasonable increase in wages from other workers, will only be followed by a widening income gap. Instead of becoming the solution, higher education could actually be part of the problem.
College mission
How should the higher education sector react to this? First, of course, universities must make equal access a part of their mission.
Unfortunately, many of the programs, such as the Bidik Misi scholarship, are only partial and have not addressed more structural problems. Programs like this often ignore the fact that the natural selection of children from poor families begins when the child is still in the mother's womb, not just at the stage of new student admissions. State intervention must be carried out more thoroughly and comprehensively.
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In addition, for universities in Indonesia, external factors, both global and national policies, add to the magnitude of the challenge. In a book that has recently become the talk of many people, Dark Academia: How Universities Die, Peter Fleming (2021), states that the world of higher education is currently facing an era known as the counter-revolution, triggered by neo-liberalism that began in the 1980s. Many universities are too focused on being factory workers, too market-driven and their own institutions become the object of commercialization.
Indonesia does not seem immune from this trend. One example can be seen in the incessant commercialization of education; campus autonomy is synonymous with reducing state subsidies, basic research has lower priority than research demanded by industries or the market. Research proposals are assessed based on the level of technological readiness (TKT) — even for basic fields and sociohumanities.
Inevitably, we are part of this era, trapped in the waves of neoliberalism in the higher education sector and forgetting the Humboldtian principles. The principle that forms the basis of this modern university views the mission of higher education holistically. Universities need to integrate research and education with the aim of producing well-informed human beings who focus on learning not only on skills-production.
Arief Anshory Yusuf
These universal principles seem to be increasingly being abandoned. Not surprisingly, over time, the true dignity of higher education will be lost. Apart from being against universal principles, this of course also contradicts the values that the founding fathers wanted to uphold. Reading the Preamble to the 45th Constitution, hopefully, we will not forget that our goal of independence is not only to achieve prosperity but to realize social justice for all Indonesian people.
Arief Anshory Yusuf, Professor of Padjadjaran University, chair of the Indonesian Professors Council Forum (FDGBI)
This article was translated by Kurniawan Siswo.
