The Kampus Merdeka policy seeks to infuse the real world into tertiary education
Google’s July launch of three new Google Career Certificates courses has put universities around the world on notice. Not only can these courses be completed in six months or less, Google will “consider our new career certificates as the equivalent of a four-year degree for related entry-level roles”.
Kent Walker, Google’s SVP of Global Affairs, wrote: “College degrees are out of reach for many Americans, and you shouldn’t need a college diploma to have economic security. We need new, accessible job-training solutions—from enhanced vocational programmes to online education—to help America recover and rebuild.”
“If the universities don't evolve, the market will evolve anyway and meet that need,” observes Nadiem Makarim, the Indonesian Minister of Education and Culture. Expanding beyond the context of America, the minister notes that if universities could “validate micro or much more condensed portions of graduate programmes and call them the equivalent of a degree, [it] is an opportunity…but it can also be a big threat to universities.”
“It's really about how universities respond to this concept, whether they fall behind or they become beneficiaries of the trend,” he adds, referring to the popularity of weeks-long courses targeted at professionals looking to update their skills in an ever-changing job market.
Speaking at the recent SMU Industry Leaders Virtual Dialogue “The Future of Higher Education in a Post COVID-19 Era”, Makarim predicted an “unbundling of masters degrees that are modularised into chunks”, and that “undergraduate degrees will also face a similar type of transformation…where you can work for a year, come back, take more credits”.
“[This] is actually the policy that we are implementing first for vocational education right now in Indonesia,” he elaborates. “One of the concepts that we will be rolling out is ‘multi-entry, multi-exit’ whereby a lot of Indonesians need income during a period. The opportunity costs of the continuous four-year cycle of education for them may be too heavy.”
Education for the real world, in the real world
In a panel discussion with SMU President Professor Lily Kong, the theme of movement and interaction between academia and industry featured prominently. Makarim highlighted Indonesia’s Kampus Merdeka policy, which translates to ‘emancipated learning’, and the role played by the real world outside of academia.
“The policy is: one year out of the four years of undergraduate [should be] outside of your major and a minimum of one semester, which is half a year, off-campus,” he explains. “One of our key [measures] for performance of universities moving forward is: what percentage of the student body has actually done a semester outside of campus through a student project, entrepreneurship, internship, or whatever it is?
“We have democratised what it means to get an undergraduate degree. Because now we allow industry and multilateral organisations, non-profits, government institutions, foreign universities, to come in and co-design the higher education curriculum.”
Makarim, who co-founded Indonesia’s first tech unicorn Gojek, emphasised the importance of hiring industry professionals to teach at universities and allowing them to keep their day jobs, and recruiting students in real-world projects. On top of ensuring constant updating of industrial knowledge that is passed on to students, this link to the industry also gets them ready for life after school.
“The shift we are trying to see in the undergraduate or the higher education experience is real-world experiences, project-based learning that train them to work in groups instead of just as individuals, which does not exist in the real world,” he elaborates.
He adds: “It's a much faster way of actually ensuring that our university students are not just being taught in the academic swimming pool, but they are actually being thrown in the open ocean for a significant amount of time of their undergraduate experience. That's one very fundamental component of our transformation.”
Matching academia and industry
For the idea to work, companies must be willing to work with universities to provide the real-world exposure. Makarim points out that the “top 10 and 20 companies and state-owned enterprises in Indonesia” have been doing this, but the next 1,000 companies need convincing to step up to provide the necessary scale.
He adds: “The challenge is not just the [lack of] interest. Even if they do do it, how can we make sure that these experiences outside of the academic environment are of the highest quality?
“The quality assurance of those programmes will be a huge challenge. There will be various programmes in the beginning stage that we struggle with quality issues, but that's the second issue related to the first issue [of attracting companies].”
Additionally, the bigger universities tend to attract most of the attention from companies willing to participate. Makarim notes that the “top 10 national universities of Indonesia are going to thrive under this programme immediately” because of faculty that are known within industry circles.
What about the lesser-known universities? What do they do?
“One of the only ways to overcome this inequity of university education is to ensure that we give smaller [and] less well-funded universities the opportunity to hyper-specialise in something that they know they can be really good at,” the minister muses. He continues:
“Conventionally, the regulatory structure around higher education does not allow that. It's a huge burden because they are put at the same standards as the large research universities, for example.
“To deliver your minimum viable promise to your students, you have to allow universities to specialise in whatever it is that they want to be great at and not put a huge amount of burden on them to become, at the same time, the best at teaching, the best at research, the best at social projects, the best at everything. No one can be the best at everything. That, by definition, means you're not the best.
“So enabling, giving the regulatory framework and encouraging hyper-specialisation is a key part that will get equal chance of those smaller universities to meet their match. Because the more specific the area that they focus on, the higher their probability of actually finding an industrial match for that specific need.”
Nadiem Makarim was the speaker and panelist at the SMU Industry Leaders Virtual Dialogue “The Future of Higher Education in a Post COVID-19 Era" that was held on 1 October 2020.
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Last updated on 29 Oct 2020 .
