Sampoerna, working through his founorders, are well-regarded comprehensive colSign up for a free weekly dation, aims to create a first-class universileges, many are narrowly-tailored institutes electronic newsletter from The ty with a curriculum that corresponds to meant to train students in specific technical Chronicle of Higher Education at the country’s economic needs and a highfields, like computer programming. Chronicle.Com/Globalnewsletter achieving student body recruited from the Still others are “diploma mills and monThe Chronicle of Higher Education is country’s lowest socio-economic classes. eymakers” that prey on unsuspecting stua US-based company with a weekly newspaper and a website updated Everyone of the 190 undergraduates dents and their parents, Agoes says. In a daily, at Global.Chronicle.com, that enrolled in the School of Education, the country where corruption is pervasive, the cover all aspects of university life. first of the university’s colleges to open, is tarnished image of private education has With over 90 writers, editors, and on financial aid. led to a growing public wariness. correspondents stationed around the In drawing disadvantaged students globe,The Chronicle provides timely news and analysis of academic ideas, A More Rigorous Model from the country’s many islands and in developments and trends. Sampoerna, a cigarette and gambling magfocusing on fields critical to this developnate, started his eponymous foundation in ing nation, such as teacher training and 2001, pledging $150 million to improve entrepreneurship, Sampoerna hopes his education. Initially, the group, which also institution can help build Indonesia’s eduruns several high school “academies”, focused on sending cational capacity and improve its economy. bright, underprivileged students overseas for study. “Only 2 percent of all kids that go to university come from Sampoerna himself graduated from University of Houston, rural areas, from the lowest economic quintile,” Sampoerna and the foundation leadership is a mixture of expatriates and notes, “And that’s what we want to change.” foreign-educated Indonesians. Private Education’s Rise But the approach was expensive—the cost of enrolling a sinFor decades the country has used funds from the World Bank gle student in a college in the United States could total and other sources to invest in educational programmes. But, $200,000 or more over four years. Sampoerna officials began to attention has frequently been diverted by more immediate chalquestion whether they could have greater impact keeping those lenges: the transition from dictatorship to democracy, the threat students in Indonesia. of domestic terrorism, and the fiscal devastation of the Asian “If we could not afford to send more students to Harvard,” financial crash. says Agung Binatoro, head of programme development at the “When you are dealing with crisis after crisis,” says Nenny foundation, “Why don’t we try to set up a school like Harvard, Soemawinata, managing director of the Putera Sampoerna with Harvard-like quality, in Indonesia?” Foundation, “It’s hard to think about the long term.” The model the philanthropy embraced was not Harvard, but Still, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has made educaAmerica’s flagship public research institutions, land-grant unition a priority, acknowledging that without bettering educaversities, founded more than a century ago with the mission to tional access and outcomes, Indonesia cannot achieve its ecogive practical training in fields vital to a nascent nation, to stunomic-development goals. dents of all economic classes. “We have to have a critical mass of educated people to move the In Indonesia, one of the most critical needs the foundation country forward,” says Irid Agoes, director of the Indonesian identified is teacher training. With a push toward universal eduInternational Education Foundation, an organisation that procation, nearly 95 percent of Indonesian children are enrolled in motes educational exchanges, particularly with the US. primary school. Yudhoyono’s government has committed to spending 20 perThe quality of that education is often poor, however. Indonecent of the federal budget on education and, in the current fiscal sian students score toward the back of the pack on international year, allocated nearly 20-trillion Rupiah ($2.2 billion), or about 9 science and mathematics tests. percent of the budget, to higher education. Some observers lay the blame on teachers, many of whom are But with 4.4 million Indonesian students dropping out of underprepared. More than half of all Indonesian teachers do not school annually, the government’s concentration has been, by have a four-year college degree. (Traditional teacher-training schools necessity, on primary and secondary education. And some here offer just a two- or three-year degree.) On any given day, one in experts, like Terance W. Bigalke, director of education profive teachers is not in the classroom, one of the highest rates of grammes at the East-West Centre, question whether the governteacher absenteeism in the world, according to the World Bank. ment can sustain its current level of support. The government has recently instituted stricter certification “Indonesia doesn’t have the financial capacity to expand highrequirements, which all teachers, both veterans and those er education without resorting to privatisation,” says Bigalke, entering the field, will have to meet by 2015. whose education and research organisation is focused on the While existing teacher-training institutes must revamp their Asia Pacific. syllabi to meet the new standards, the Sampoerna School of In recent years, the number of private colleges in the country has Education was created with those guidelines in mind, says Pauexploded. While some, particularly those associated with religious lina Pannen, the dean. November 2010 EDUTECH
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