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ndonesia is at risk of missing the opportunity to benefit from its demographic dividend — which will peak in 2025 to 2030 — as it struggles to keep its youth at school in order to produce a quality workforce.

A demographic dividend is when the proportion of people in the productive age group (15 to 64 years) reaches a maximum and the dependency ratio is at its lowest level.

It is perceived as a demographic bonus as the country in question will have the opportunity to utilize its working-age population and maximize its economic productivity.

The current composition of the country’s workforce may indicate that the demographic bonus could be more of a bust than a boon for the world’s fourth largest country.

According to 2014 data from the National Development Planning Board (Bappenas), 42 percent of the workforce were elementary school graduates, while 26 percent had graduated junior high school and 22 percent finished senior high school. That leaves only 10 percent who graduated from university.

The current workforce composition will eventually phase out, but not until 2030, when Indonesia is also estimated to lose its demographic bonus.

“The current composition will be reversed by 2030, when elementary school graduates will only make up 20 percent of our workforce, while high school graduates will jump to 30 percent,” the Culture and Education Ministry’s senior advisor on innovation and competitiveness, Ananto Kusuma Seta, told The Jakarta Post recently.

The current workforce is dominated by elementary school graduates because they were products of the past educational system, when it was only mandatory for people to attend school for six years as mandated in the six-year compulsory education program launched in 1984.

Junior high school graduates also make up a large percentage of the workforce because it was not until 1994 that the nine-year compulsory education program kicked off. A 12-year compulsory education program was launched just last year.

Though it has just kicked off, Ananto said he was optimistic that the country had enough time to ensure high school graduates would dominate the workforce by 2030.

“We just have to make sure that the current middle school students continue to high school,” he said. “By 2030, we are hoping all Indonesian children have at least graduated from high school. It’s not too late [to secure the demographic bonus], but we have to work hard.”

The government has been working to bring dropouts back to school through the Indonesia Smart Card (KIP), a signature program from President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo, in order to ensure a quality future workforce.

Recent figures on school dropouts are not encouraging.

In the last four years, about 5 million children have dropped out of elementary school or decided not to continue to junior high school, according to the ministry’s data.

The government is planning to encourage 4.1 million of them back to school, Ananto said. “So that in the next 15 years, they will become productive,” he said.

Many students dropped out because of economic and cultural reasons, Ananto said. In rural areas, he explained, boys were expected to help their parents in agriculture, while some girls were married off by their parents at a young age.

University of Indonesia (UI) economics and demography expert Mayling Oey-Gardiner said the current workforce composition was extremely alarming.

“If we have the people but they’re not productive, how can we call it a bonus? A bonus is when we have quality and hardworking people, not when we have people,” she said. Besides the low number of high school and university graduates, quality also left a lot to be desired, Mayling said.

According to the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), which assesses the skills of adults in Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries aged 16 to 65 years, Indonesian adults performed abysmally.

In the survey, Indonesian university graduates aged 25 to 65, youth aged 20 to 24 without university degrees, youth aged 16 to 24 with high school certificates and those who only had primary school education scored the lowest in literacy among all 34 OECD countries.