In January, the country saw at least 77,875 local students enrolling in foreign universities in 15 countries around the world, including in Southeast Asia. The figure is almost seven times higher than the number of students originating from the same countries pursuing their study in Indonesia, which stood at 12,374.

The gap has grown larger since 2017 when 64,672 Indonesian studied in the 15 countries and 7,791 foreign students were enrolled in Indonesia.

Large gaps between outbound and inbound countries are not only observed in developed countries like the United States but also in neighboring countries such as Malaysia and Thailand, both of which received around 10,000 Indonesian students while sending only around 3,500 students at the beginning of this year.

With more than 1,000 universities, institutes and polytechnics spread across the archipelago and tens of thousands of study programs offered, the country is struggling to excel on the international stage, as shown by their presence, or lack thereof, in acknowledged global university rankings.

This has prompted Research, Technology and Higher Education Minister Mohamad Nasir to announce plans to recruit foreign academics in a bid to boost local universities into the list of top 200 universities in the world — a move that has raised criticism among education practitioners and observers.

The latest QS World University Rankings report by global university rating institution Quacquarelli Symonds, which the government uses as a reference, placed three Indonesian universities in its top-500 list, with the University of Indonesia (UI) placing highest at 296th place. Three other universities were ranked between 601st and 800th place and another three between 801st and 1,000th.

The report also takes into account a university’s ability to attract students from across the world by measuring its international faculty ratio and international student ratio in determining the rankings, although there are four other indicators playing a bigger role in the decisions.

Center of Education, Regulation and Development Analysis (CERDAS) observer Indra Charismiadji said the poor quality of local universities had not only discouraged foreign students from pursuing a degree in the country but also pushed local students abroad.

“Countries like Singapore, Malaysia and Australia are taking advantage of the bad quality of our education to tap into our students,” he told The Jakarta Post.

Indra argued that to qualify for global competition, local universities should start focusing on research as it would allow learning processes not to solely rely on theories. The research performance of universities remains low, he said, adding that the government had to provide a supportive environment for researchers, such as improved grant schemes and regulations.

“Some academics are reluctant to conduct research because of their research yields unexpected results, such as failure, they could be accused of embezzling their grant. While research, in nature, is about trial and error,” he said.

The Research, Technology and Higher Education Ministry’s director general for research and development, Muhammad Dimyati, concurred that universities’ research performance would affect foreign students’ choices as they commonly refer to global rankings, which place a heavy significance on the institutions’ research performance.

The QS World University Rankings report, for example, uses as its main indicators a university’s teaching and research quality (40 percent) and citations per faculty (20 percent), consisting of research output based on the total number of citations.

Dimyati said that Indonesia’s funding allocation for research was only 0.25 percent of its gross domestic product, lower than that of neighboring countries, such as Thailand with 0.6 percent, Malaysia with 1 percent and Singapore 2 percent.

However, he added that the government had prepared a “supportive ecosystem” for researchers with existing regulations and the newly passed national system of science and technology law that encourages research.

“With the new law, researchers who have conducted research based on scientific methodologies and passed the ethics committee but don’t meet the expected results won’t be sanctioned,” he told the Post.

Supriyadi Rustad, a member of the ministry’s academic performance evaluation team, said that though research played an important role in attracting foreign students, character-building and integrity offered by local universities were of no less importance.

“Our problem is deeper than just quality; it’s integrity. With plagiarism and fake degrees still existing here, would foreign students choose to study here? [...] If the government is committed to improving human resources, then it should start with building an academic culture and separating education institutions from politics,” he said. (tru)

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