Indonesia’s higher education system is binary in nature. It has an academic, research-oriented track and a more applied vocational or professional track. The country’s qualifications framework, established in 2012 to facilitate mobility between academic programs and the recognition of prior learning, illustrates the different subsystems and how they are related.

Indonesia has a vast, rapidly growing, and highly diverse higher education landscape. Nearly 4,500 HEIs offer programs in 25,000 different majors and enroll close to eight million students (2017). There are several different types of HEIs, including universities, institutes, advanced schools, academies, polytechnics, and community academies. While enrollments at Islamic institutions are surging, most HEIs in Indonesia are secular. Only about 16 percent of institutions were faith-based in 2015, including 11 public universities and 95 private universities. Together they enrolled approximately 11 percent of the total student population in 2013.

The vast majority—more than 90 percent—of HEIs in Indonesia are privately owned. But while enrollments at private HEIs are swelling, many private institutions are small providers with 500 students or less, so that public institutions enroll around 37 percent of all tertiary students. Public institutions also tend to have a better reputation in Indonesia as well as internationally: All five Indonesian universities included among the top 2,000 in the current Times Higher Education World University Ranking, for example, are public, including the University of Indonesia, Indonesia’s oldest public university ranked highest at position 601—800, and the Bandung Institute of Technology (ranked at position 801—1,000).

Read more in WENR website here.