Similar issues first arose when President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo issued a 2016 presidential instruction to revive vocational education, said Patdono Suwignjo, director general of science, technology and higher education institutions at the Research, Technology and Higher Education Ministry.

He said it would take a long time for there to be as many polytechnic schools as there are universities across the country. The ministry only sees two or three new applications for polytechnic schools per year, even after it stopped granting new university applications in 2017.

“If we keep at this pace, we’ll need 800 years to add another 2,075 polytechnics to match the number of universities,” he said during his keynote speech at the Indonesia Vocational Education and Training Summit in Jakarta on Wednesday.

Indonesia currently has about 300 polytechnic schools, equal to only 20 percent of all the higher education institutions in the country. The cost of establishing a new polytechnic school in Indonesia was much higher than the cost of opening a university, Patdono added.

“The cost of establishing a new polytechnic can reach up to Rp 400 billion [US$28.24 million], while the cost of establishing a new university is only Rp 30 billion,” said Patdono, adding that the ministry would continue to impose a “moratorium” on new universities until 2024 and only approve applications from new polytechnic schools in partnership with industries.

The ministry is also seeking to partner with foreign companies and governments from countries like Australia, Korea and the Netherlands to improve the quality of Indonesia’s vocational education, according to the ministry’s director of learning, Paristiyanti Nurwardani.

Popular

What Indonesia can learn from the Iran–Israel war

Police seek to polish image with new video platform amid public distrust

Two arrested in North Sumatra for allegedly producing vape liquid laced with narcotics