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Engineering schools have highest dropout rates: Ministry
Data shows that up to 4.66 percent of total engineering students quit before graduation.
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In 2018 alone, Indonesia lacked up to 69,000 engineers and, if nothing changes, the deficit will continue until 2024. (Shutterstock/File)
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mid a shortage of engineers in the country, data has revealed an even bitter reality that engineering schools at Indonesian universities have the highest dropout rates.
Biomedical engineering student Gabriela Zurliana, 18, who attends a state university in Surabaya, East Java, was among those determined to quit her engineering program, saying that she could no longer cope with the workload and challenges.
She was only in her second semester but she knew she had met her limit.
“It was my father’s choice,” she said, explaining why she chose a program that she felt did not suit her.
Gabriela said she had initially aimed to apply for the international relations program but her parents disagreed so she picked a program she was neither familiar with nor had interest in.
“I’m planning to leave. [Engineering] is hard for me because the courses are difficult. It is a multi-disciplinary program so I had to learn basic engineering, medical affairs, technology, electronics, programming,and so on,” Gabriela told The Jakarta Post on Monday.
Gabriela is not alone in her plan to leave the program. One of her friends quit after one semester while there are three others are thinking about dropping out.
“All of us felt that we were in the wrong program.”
Higher Education Statistical Year Book 2018, released by the Research, Technology and Higher Education Ministry, showed that engineering programs had seen the highest numbers of dropouts, with 4.66 percent of the engineering student population having decided to quit their programs before graduation. Economy majors ranked second after engineering with 3.73 percent of the economic student population, followed by art majors at 3.59 percent.
Although the data did not elaborate on the details such as the reasons behind the dropouts, Ismunandar, the ministry’s director general of learning and students affairs, said the ratio of college dropouts were not far different from those in previous years.
“We are currently studying the data [to learn about the problems],” Ismunandar told the Post, recently.
Responding to the data, the secretary-general of the Indonesian Engineers Union (PII), Robert Sianipar, said the high dropout rates in engineering were mainly caused by the level of difficulty of the studies and the examinations.
“We lack engineers because studying engineering is not easy and there are other fields [that are not as difficult but] promise better incentives. There must be clear information about employment opportunities and incentives,” Robert said.
In 2018 alone, Indonesia lacked up to 69,000 engineers. If nothing changes, the deficit will continue until 2024, he said.
“The [slow] increase [in the number of] engineers cannot keep up with the [rapid] infrastructure development,” he said.
Read also: Lack of engineers puts infrastructure dreams at risk
Robert added that the situation had worsened because not all engineering graduates decided to pursue careers in engineering.
Data suggests there were 103,000 new engineers in Indonesia in 2016, up from 87,000 in 2013. However, of the number, only 50 percent actually worked in the engineering field, while the remaining decided to pursue careers in other fields.
Meanwhile, Youthmanual, a platform created to guide senior high school students in designing their futures, said the phenomenon had occurred because many students had picked majors not based on their true passions and abilities.
Youthmanual founder Rizky Muhammad said the study, which was conducted between 2016 and 2019, had surveyed 400,000 university students across Indonesia. It showed that 45 percent of the respondents thought they picked the wrong program. Meanwhile, 800,000 high school students said they did not know what to study in college after they graduated high school.
“Every student is unique, but instead of pursuing pathways based on scientific and real data about themselves such as passion, strengths, competency and personal values, they tend to make uninformed decisions based on peers and family influence,” he said.
