Government Plans Close ‘Irrelevant’ University Programs
On April 23, 2026, at a national population symposium in Bali, Secretary General of Indonesia's Ministry of Higher Education Badri Munir Sukoco announced that the government would soon close university programs deemed irrelevant to industry needs. Every year, Indonesian universities produce 1.9 million graduates, and the government argues too many of them cannot find work. The fix: align higher education with eight strategic industries, from energy to digitalization.
Programs that don't fit the list face evaluation, cuts, or outright closure. The announcement wasn't yet a formal policy, but it didn't need to be to start a conversation worth having. Because before any program gets shut down, there is one question that deserves a serious answer first: what is a university actually supposed to produce?
If university, then good jobs?
Let's be honest about something before we go further. Most Indonesian students, and their families, go to university because they need a better life. That is not shallow. That is not wrong. For millions of families who sacrificed everything to send their kids to college, getting a good job is the whole point, and there is nothing to be embarrassed about in that.
The problem is not students wanting jobs. The problem is when the state decides that producing employable workers is the only thing a university is for. The Education Law, passed in 2003, actually provides a clear objective for education in Indonesia. It defines national education as the formation of a complete human being: faithful, ethical, creative, democratic, and responsible. Not a ready-to-deploy unit of labour.
What education is really for…
Ki Hajar Dewantara – whose face is on our Teachers' Day celebration but whose ideas we rarely sit with long enough – described education as a guidance, not a demand. The goal was to nurture human potential, not to optimize it for someone else's benefit. A university, at its best, is where a young person learns not just how to work, but how to think, how to question, and how to tell the difference between what is efficient and what is right.
These are not luxury skills for the privileged few – they are the things that turn a graduate into a citizen. And citizenship, real citizenship, is what a democracy actually runs on. You can build the most productive workforce in Southeast Asia and still watch your democracy quietly hollow out from the inside.
Education As Foundation Of Democracy
Indonesia's democracy did not arrive by accident. It was paid for in 1998, on the streets, at Semanggi and Trisakti, by students who had been enlightened that injustice was worth naming out loud. Democracy needs these people to survive. Not just voters who show up at the ballot box every five years, but citizens who notice when something is wrong, who have the vocabulary to say so, and who refuse to be talked out of their instincts by official language.
That is the moral agent that a university is supposed to produce. No other institution in society has quite the same mandate or the same conditions to do it. Not the marketplace. Not the government. Not the algorithm.
A Market Of Priceless Ideas
We have seen what happens when that critical voice weakens. Corrupt officials smile for cameras. Policies that hurt ordinary people get rebranded as national interest. Evictions become development. Environmental destruction becomes the cost of progress.
To call these things by their real names, to stand in a room and say this is wrong, this is unjust, this cannot continue, you need a person with a rich moral vocabulary and the nerve to use it. That vocabulary does not grow in a vacuum. It grows in universities that give students space to think freely, to argue, to read history, and to understand that some questions matter even when they have no market value.
Where else can we go?
So the real question this policy raises is not which programs are relevant or irrelevant. It is this: if universities are fully converted into workforce production machines, who exactly is going to look after our democracy? Who is going to ask whether the development we are chasing is actually fair, or sustainable, or for everyone?
No other institution has the mandate or the conditions to raise those questions the way universities do. When universities abandon that role, we do not just lose a few academic programs. We lose one of the last institutional spaces where free thinking is still the whole point.
A Citizen To Its Fullest
Indonesia's demographic dividend, the young population we keep celebrating as our greatest asset, will only be a gift if what grows alongside the numbers is human quality, and it is not measured by employability alone. It is measured by the capacity to think, to empathize, to be accountable to other people and to the country.
The greatest investment a nation can make is not a new industrial park or a digital infrastructure project. It is making sure that every young person who walks out of a university is not just ready for a job, but ready to be a full citizen: someone who knows their history, understands their values, and is willing to defend both.
Beyond A Policymaking Decision
In the end, this is not really an education policy debate. It is a question about what kind of country we are trying to build. Is the Indonesia we want one filled with technically skilled workers who have quietly forgotten how to question power? Or one where citizens are not only good at their jobs but also capable of protecting this republic from within, through conscience, through moral courage, through the kind of integrity no industry can manufacture?
A university that only teaches people how to find work might produce a more efficient economy, but a university that teaches people how to be human produces an Indonesia that is truly free.
