The countdown to the Golden Indonesia 2045 is currently underway. This year's National Education Day 2021 coincides with the 76th anniversary of Independence Day. Our great hope is that when we are having centennial celebration of our Independence Day in 2045, all Indonesian people will have been able to access good education and produce excellent and competent human resources who are able to take part at global level in their respective fields.

The ongoing pandemic in its second year offers an excellent opportunity to pause and consider the successes and failures of our nation's higher education system. One of the important questions is whether our universities are ready enough to welcome 100 years of the independence, in accordance with the vision of becoming an industrial country?

Given that universities are established to create competent human resources with specific expertise who can fill all roles in economic and social life, the university phase of education is the most important of all stages of education.

Since the goal of higher education is to prepare the "golden generation" for the future golden year of 2045, when access to higher education becomes more universal, institutional readiness and qualified teaching staff become extremely important. Education may enhance people's well-being by improving their intellect and skills while also placing a priority on their mental and spiritual well-being. That is one of the goals of higher education.

Gap anxiety

The position of universities becomes very strategic when it is associated with social, economic, and, especially, intellectual values. Social values include expanding the reach and increasing the affordability of higher education so that it can be easily accessed by people from all strata. Economic value includes the creation of competent and matched human resources with the industrial sector through the transfer of knowledge and technical skills that are continuously updated and in harmony with a dynamic environment. Intellectual value includes strengthening the discipline of knowledge based on the improvement of qualified and excellent research with full support of the stakeholders, which will ultimately improve the quality of human resources with excellent morality.

For now, Indonesia's condition is in accordance with the report of the world agency United Nations Development Program (UNDP). This credible institution has included Indonesia into the group of countries with high human resource development. However, Indonesia's Human Development Index (HDI) ranking is 0.707, in the 111th rank in the world. When compared to our neighbors such as the Philippines (106th), Thailand (77th), and Malaysia (61st), it turns out that we are far behind. Why is our HDI rating still so low? Because our unemployment rate is still quite high.

According to the data from the Central Bureau of Statistics, Indonesia's total workforce currently stands at 137.91 million people and unemployment at 9.77 million people. Of the unemployed, 2.56 million were those having no jobs from the last one year, along with the occurrence of Covid-19 pandemic. This pandemic also increased the unemployment rate from the previous 5.23%, to 7.07%.

According to economists, Indonesia has been unable to break free of the middle income trap. Unless we are serious about reforming and/or altering the education system, we will remain stuck as a developing country for a very long time, and it will continue to be challenging to move up as a developed country. This is a concise description of the issues surrounding universities' strategic stance in relation to social, economic, and intellectual values.

In this phase, the alarming reality of educational gaps in marginal social groups and the uneven distribution of higher education in rural places needs to be addressed rapidly. In addition, it is also about the readiness of the graduates with various qualities who generally have difficulties when entering the industrial sector.

The uneven quality of university graduates cannot be separated from the diverse quality of universities in this country. This is also related to how challenging it is for university research outcomes and products to compete in the international scientific community. Given their crucial role in developing excellent human resources, higher education institutions determine a nation's progress.

Based on data released by credible institutions in university ranking of universities, such as Webometrics or Scimago, Indonesia's public and private universities continue to be ranked lower than those of nations with a similar age of independence, such as South Korea, or even with our Malaysian brothers.

Universities must therefore push themselves harder than ever to support the realization of the vision for a Golden Indonesia in 2045. We must pay attention to the elements that can help universities advance and become more competitive globally. One of these factors is enhancing cooperation with prominent international institutions, which can be accomplished through research initiatives, dual degrees, twinning degrees, and student and faculty exchanges.

Another collaboration that can be carried out is the development of a student-oriented curriculum and virtual learning system whose opportunities are actually wide open in the current pandemic conditions, even though until the second year of this pandemic our virtual education is still sluggish.

New collaborative research

In addition to other main elements, a benchmark in the progress of higher education is the quality of research. Lecturers and students must be eager to promote qualified research. Research grant programs, for example, should be a culture of competition to demonstrate the quality of research, not just to pursue project funds or collect credit for administrative needs.

The scope of research should reach new interdisciplinary areas of expertise, opening up opportunities for the creation of new knowledge, and be relevant to Indonesia's progress. The fields of bioscience, nanotechnology, composite materials, aeronautics, propellants, renewable energy, stem cells, and environmentally friendly technologies are examples of some sectors where knowledge and technology are very challenging to develop, which in turn will strengthen the transformation process of the education system.

Various universities can synergize, combining their respective advantages for joint research. Thus, research can be more focused, integrated, reach more universities and be more cost-effective. Recent examples that inspire hope are research collaborations by several universities that have succeeded in producing findings to overcome the covid-19 pandemic, such as ventilators, GeNose, 'nurse' robots, antigen tests, vaccines, plasma donors, stem cell methods, to mapping the genome of new variants. viral mutation.

The collaboration opportunities are not limited to domestic universities, but also with qualified foreign universities. Thus, our universities are expected to be not only great in the country, but also great in the international arena.

Currently, maybe we feel that our education system is fine because we are content with a few universities that have been ranked in the 1000th or even 500th best universities in the world. However, after being hit by the pandemic, all sectors of life have changed completely, including the education sector. This has forced almost all universities to adapt, find new appropriate ways and formats so that the education process can continue in a pandemic situation.

The paradigm shift experienced by various sectors around the world is expected to become a collaborative and synergistic opportunity to achieve Golden Indonesia 2045. In this context, we need governance support that prioritizes regulating outcomes rather than monitoring inputs. The results from the funds used are emphasized more than the consumption of the allocated funds, but still prioritizing the efficient-effective principle.

Research and professional alumni

Remember that there may not be many universities that are genuinely research-based at this time. In addition to encouraging the growth of research universities, it is important to give those institutions extra support so they can set the standard for all other tertiary institutions in terms of the subjects they teach, how they manage their research, and the extracurricular activities they offer their students, all of which are intended to foster a culture of lifelong learning.

In order to foster collaboration, libraries, curricula, academic content, and research results should not only be appreciated by lecturers and students at the university, but can also be a accessible for millions of other students through the massive open online courses (MOOCs) model.  This makes research universities more accessible to persons outside of their own academic community, particularly to those who require access to scholarly materials and findings from current studies.

The core of higher education is research. However, in the context of developing countries, universities are also highly expected to become institutions that produce professional alumni who are ready to work. Alumni from universities are expected to possess knowledge, technical expertise, macro insight, and problem-solving abilities.

That is what industry requires. For instance, a civil engineer might oversee the construction of a bridge. He cares about more than just the technological and financial advantages; he also considers things like the social impact and minimizing eviction victims by providing decent compensation.

The history of our independence shows that the founding fathers were scientists and intellectuals of their time. They were all avid book readers. The sessions in the institution that prepared the independence before the proclamation, for example, became an intellectual debate of a very high quality that it can be enjoyed to this day. It was these activist intellectuals who brought this nation to its independence. After the proclamation of independence, the next stage was to maintain independence, during which the role of intellectual statesmen was greatly assisted by armed military struggle.

However, the direction of the state's revolution is largely determined by the intellectual struggles among its statesmen in solving the nation's problems. Universities are increasingly important to become suppliers of scientists, doctors, economists, technologists, and intellectuals who fill and interpret the blessing of independence while upholding moral ethics.

Therefore, in facing the vision of Golden Indonesia 2045, universities need to continue to push themselves, improve the quality of research, be sensitive to the national situation, and take sides with the interests of the people. Institutionally at the state level, the Ministry of Education and Culture has been merged with Research and Technology. This is good, but its success clearly depends on the leadership quality of its leaders.

Djoko Santoso
Professor, Faculty of Medicine, Universitas Airlangga
Chairman of Health Department, Indonesian Council of Ulama, East Java

Translated from Indonesian:
"Harap Cemas Universitas, Menuju Indonesia Emas" by Djoko Santoso
Media Indonesia, 3 May 2021
Source: ttps://mediaindonesia.com/opini/402450/harap-cemas-universitas-menuju-indonesia-emas