Indonesia needs to focus more on higher education in order to speed up the improvement of the country's whole education sector, a seminar on education concluded.
Titled "Education in Indonesia and Japan: Future Challenges and Opportunities" and held by the Japanese Foundation in collaboration with Paramadina University, the seminar's speakers agreed the participation level in secondary education was still low, and thus needed to be upgraded.
The seminar also featured Toru Kikkawa, a professor of human sciences from Osaka University, Japan, as the keynote speaker.
Paramadina University rector Anies Baswedan said the government had not given the same amount of attention to higher education as it had to elementary education.
"One of the challenges this country faces is in intermediate education. not all regions have high schools.
There should be high schools and universities built in all regions if the government wants to use education as an escalator to reach higher social and economic strata," he told the seminar.
He added education was currently seen as an industry, and consequently had burdened students with high fees, thus disturbing the development of education.
"Universities should not see students as customers from whom they can get money; I believe there are still many universities that do that," Anies said.
"The government should also intervene here to restructure the fee system if it wants to see high education attainment."
Bachtiar Alam, director of the University of Indonesia's Research and Community Service Directorate, said although he did not agree with industrialization, it could not be denied that education was still categorized as a luxury.
"Medication and education are costly. We can't compromise on quality," he said, adding that high costs in education were due to a lack of investment in the sector.
In his presentation, Kikkawa showed that high school attainment in his country had reached 97 percent of the total population of around 127.7 million, the world's 10th most populated country.
At university level, he added, Japan's educational attainment had reached 50 percent, the second highest after Canada.
Rapid educational expansion and long-lasting post-expansion, Kikkawa said, were strategies used to improve the Japanese educational system with equal dichotomy of educational categories.
According to the Central Statistic Agency (BPS), Indonesia saw 825,876 people studying at state universities in 2007, while those at private university numbered more than 1.75 million.
Another strategy to strengthen the country's education sector, Bachtiar said, was for universities to further open themselves inward and outward.
"They need to maximize their own potential while adopting appropriately universal values," he said.
"This should be strengthened in sync, not just on one side."
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