Equity and Access in a Constantly Expanding Indonesian Higher Education System

Abstract

The history of higher education (HE) in Indonesia in the early twentieth century was marked by discrimination. The first HE institution (HEI), Technische Hogeschool, was established in 1920 in Bandung with twenty-eight students, of which twenty-two were Dutch, four Chinese, and two Indonesian. In the year 1923/24, this school graduated eleven people, none of whom were Indonesian. The first Indonesian graduates occurred in 1925/26, one of whom was Soekarno, who would become the first president of the Republic of Indonesia. Education in that era was used to maintain social status and diversity. Indonesian schools for local students were slowly established by the Dutch. Whereas Spain had established HE in the Philippines in the sixteenth century, and England followed in India in the seventeenth, the Dutch did not establish HE in Indonesia until the twentieth century. In the 1930s, the percentage of citizens who attended school was only 2.3, compared with, 4.5 in India, 9.7 in the Philippines, and 19.5 in the Netherlands (Nasution 2001: 144–145). In that year (1930), only ninety-one Indonesians had the status of students, becoming one hundred and sixty-seven in 1940, or only three per million people. At that time only members of noble families could possibly attend school. Commoners were unable to do so because the costs of middle school were beyond reach. This was also the situation for those from Java. For them schooling was expensive, very limited, and only available in the center of the island.