Data from the 2018 Higher Educational Statistical Year Book issued by the Research, Technology and Higher Education Ministry show that the professor-lecturer ratio in Sulawesi is the largest in Indonesia with 2.5 percent of a total of 26,686 lecturers on the island being professors.

Java followed slightly behind Sulawesi; of a total of 134,145 lecturers on Java, 2.4 percent are professors.

The ministry’s Information and Data Center said the high prevalence of professors on the island had existed for several years.

Higher education professionals, however, have questioned the phenomenon as the trend has yet to have a significant impact on the quality of higher education on the island.

“I don’t see their impact on the quality of higher education in Sulawesi. So far, I only see the impact of it on the development of universities’ accreditation,” the secretary of the Indonesian Lecturers Association (ADI) in South Sulawesi, Mulyadi Hamid, told The Jakarta Post on Tuesday.

The ministry’s latest list of the country’s top 100 universities is more telling. The 2018 list showed that Java dominated the list with 69 universities. Sumatra came second with 12 universities, while Sulawesi was in third place with eight.

Only seven of the best universities are located in Bali and Nusa Tenggara while Kalimantan, one of the most resource-rich parts of the country, only hosts four.

Mulyadi believes the awareness of people in Sulawesi of the importance of higher education encourages many lecturers in Sulawesi to pursue their careers and to become professors.

“Lecturers in Sulawesi have relatively more time for their academic activities. There are very few large companies here so they don’t have many options to become consultants in business. They have more opportunity to prepare for the administrative process of becoming a professor,” he said.

Dwi Andayani, the ADI head secretary in Jakarta, said that in Indonesia, a professorship was merely a functional position since it was the highest position in an academic’s career at university.

“The numbers of professors could be high simply because they [the lecturers] have already fulfilled the administrative requirements to be a professor,” she said.

Dwi said the indicators of quality in higher education were seen in research work that gets recognition in international journals. Other indicators could be the quality of university graduates.

Responding to the high ratio of Sulawesi professors, Education and Culture Ministry secretary-general Ainun Naim, said that numbers alone were not sufficient to improve the quality of higher education.

“Are they productive? Theoretically the more professors, the better. But if the professors are not productive, then it would be better if they remained productive lecturers,” Ainun told the Post.

Dwi agreed and emphasized that although one of the requirements of becoming professor was actively conducting research in their field, not many Indonesian professors did enough research and writing.

“This is what we have to study more. A greater research contribution at international level would further reflect the improved quality of education development in our country,” she said.

Dwi said that according to the 2018 Global Competitiveness Index, Indonesia was ranked at 68 in the world in innovation capacity, well behind Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand at 14, 30 and 51, respectively.

“That means our universities have not produced graduates with good enough skills [to create] innovation in industry,” she said.

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