Poor students gets 20% seats

JAKARTA: National Education Minister Muhammad Nuh says he had issued a policy to allocate 20 percent of the state universities’ seat quota for students with lower incomes due to the decline in the number of underprivileged students entering state universities.

“We will also free them from tuition fees. So they will only have to bring themselves to college,” Djoko said Tuesday as quoted by tempointeraktif.com.

Director general of higher education Djoko Santoso had separately said that students’ living costs were expected to be covered by scholarships, which the students would attain upon meeting certain requirements, while tuition fees would be fully covered by the government.

Priyo Suprobo, rector of the Surabaya Institute of Technology (ITS), said the institute had not been able to fully support the living costs of the students due to lack of budget.

Therefore, he added, ITS looked for alternative funding from companies such as PT Pelabuhan Indonesia III.

“In the mean time, we are fully covering their tuition fees,” he said. — JP