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View all search resultsThe wrong remedy: Evaluating university study program closures
Closing university programs based solely on immediate employment metrics mistakes a labor-market symptom for an educational diagnosis. Indonesia needs institutions that form human character and an economy capable of receiving them, not a policy that merely moves the burden of unemployment onto the students.
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University of Indonesia campus in Depok, West Java. (Wikimedia Commons/Ilham Kuniawan Gumilang)
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losing a study program because its graduates are unemployed assumes that the program’s only legitimate output is a job. Under this logic, if graduates do not enter the workforce quickly enough, the program is deemed a failure. This assumption reduces the university to a staffing agency with a four-year queue, suggesting that education is valid only when the market immediately confirms it.
It is the kind of logic that sounds efficient in a ministry briefing but unravels the moment it meets any serious reflection on the purpose of education.
That assumption also relocates responsibility. When graduates enter the labor market and cannot find suitable work, the question is not only what universities produced, but also what kind of economy has been built to receive them. A policy that begins and ends with university closure avoids this second question, even though it is the harder and more significant one.
Yet, the Higher Education, Science, and Technology Ministry (Kemendiktisaintek) has proposed precisely this line of action. Secretary General Badru Munir Sukoco announced on April 23 that study programs failing to demonstrate industry relevance will be reviewed and, if necessary, closed. The ministry counts the 1.9 million graduates produced annually, reads that figure against employment absorption, and concludes that some programs must go.
The officials delivering this verdict carry impressive academic titles, which makes the proposal more troubling, not less. It demonstrates how easily credentialed authority can mistake a labor-market symptom for an educational diagnosis.
The 1945 Harvard Report, “General Education in a Free Society”, was written when the United States faced a similar tension between mass education and economic absorption. It drew a distinction that Kemendiktisaintek has collapsed: special education trains for a specific occupation, while general education prepares a person to think, judge, and function as a citizen. Employment statistics measure the former, but they cannot register the latter.
The answer is not to choose between generalists and specialists. A serious university must produce both, but in the right order: formation comes first; specialization follows. A graduate without judgment becomes brittle when industries change, while a graduate without competence remains vague when work must be done. The ministry’s mistake is to compress this entire sequence into short-term placement, as if employability in the first year after graduation were the full measure of an education.
