Enhancing US-RI education cooperation

The United States-Indonesia Society (USINDO) Special Event: “Expanding Bilateral Education Cooperation under the Forthcoming Comprehensive Partnership between the United States and Indonesia”, and the 90th anniversary of the Institute of International Education (with counterpart the Indonesian International Education Foundation), are very timely, and have left us with both challenges and hopes.

The speakers tried to explain why the number of US-Indonesia educational exchanges has declined over the years. What would it take to increase those numbers under an Indonesia-US comprehensive partnership, currently being planned?

What needs to be done to familiarize Indonesians with opportunities to study in the US? What fields are suggested for partnership between American and Indonesian institutions?

What role can the Indonesian public play in the development of partnership goals in education?
Increasing the number of Indonesian students to study in American universities for degrees (undergraduate and graduate) and the number of American students to study in Indonesia is one such challenge.

The appeal of Indonesia to American students and public, and America to Indonesian students and public cannot be increased without proactive and strategic marketing from both ends.

Information about opportunities, including scholarships and assistantships and procedures to prepare and to succeed needs to be supplied more effectively and attractively through websites, brochures, visits, and students, teachers and alumni ambassadors.

Partnership implies equality, but Americans thus far have more financial and technical resources than their Indonesian counterparts.

For example, it is more likely to have American students self-financed to visit and study in Indonesia than to invite Indonesians to fund themselves to study in America.

Scholarships are for most Indonesians the only possible means, but there are an increased number of such scholarships (provided by international funding agencies, departments, universities and research centers), but the information is yet to be disseminated more aggressively to a wider networks of Indonesian educational institutions and the public.

The National Education Ministry and its directorates play a crucial role, but NGOs and private educational institutions should have more initiatives to start building relationships with American institutions through correspondences and visits followed up with joint programs. Networking is the key to mutual gains, but effective and sustained networking seems still to be lacking.

Americans, either paid or working as volunteers, are expected to teach, train, or guide Indonesian teachers and or students in Indonesia, not only in lectures, but also focused workshops in fields of common interest, such as English, research methodology and writing, American history and cultural diversity.

On the other hand, Indonesian educators, paid or volunteer, can teach American teachers and students in America about Indonesian language, history, culture, economy, politics, and so forth.

Faculty exchange will help improve mutual understanding and appreciation of shared characteristics, unique histories and diversities.

Fields of study have varied, including political sciences, anthropology, sociology, religious studies, Islamic studies, and other arts, humanities and social sciences, but also climatology, tourism, arts, business and management, urban planning, computer science and other natural sciences and technology.

The key idea here is that people know what they want and are excited to learn and how what they learn can benefit the advancement of knowledge and science in both countries.

Each university needs to recognize what gaps in fields of study that could reduce the over-supply of certain fields and a lack in other fields. Distribution of fields of study in universities or regions is important.

Indonesian scholars fall short in international publications, especially in English. Local scholarly journals have increased in quantity, but few Indonesian scholars publish and are cited internationally.
To improve this gap, American and Indonesian scholars who have published internationally should help their Indonesian fellows individually or collectively in conducting research and writing scholarly articles.

In writing scholarly articles, access to primary and secondary sources is crucial, and American universities can help Indonesian institutions build and improve their library collections of books and journal databases.

Apart from electronic materials, another aspect of educational development is the availability of affordable printed books. In India, for instance, publishers have been able to reproduce international books in local papers with affordable prices.

It is also strategic to increase translations of quality Indonesian research products into English, not simply English materials into Indonesian.

Indonesia has become a field of research for many American scholars, but Indonesians have yet to make Indonesia as their field of research and make themselves as producers of knowledge, but also make America and other countries their research fields. Indonesians and Americans have learned from each other’s strengths and weaknesses, but more importantly, this mutual learning should be recorded as research can help strengthen knowledge and technology development.

An increased literacy of both Indonesians and Americans requires political and social engineering, but there is the prerequisite of a cultural paradigm, that is, to be educated is a public right.


The writer, Ph.D, is an assistant professor at the Religious Studies Department, the University of California, Riverside and a summer lecturer at the State Islamic University, Jakarta.