APAC Supplement
Indonesia's higher education race to 2045
Amid a doctor shortage and a wave of foreign partnerships, Indonesia is aiming to build a globally competitive higher education system by its independence centennial.
By Michelle Zhu
APAC Supplement
Indonesia's higher education race to 2045
Amid a doctor shortage and a wave of foreign partnerships, Indonesia is aiming to build a globally competitive higher education system by its independence centennial.
By Michelle Zhu
15 October 2026
In brief
- Indonesia is launching ambitious higher education reforms and foreign partnerships to build a globally competitive system by 2045.
- The plan features ten new flagship campuses, expanded research funding and deep transnational ties with overseas universities.
- Long-term success depends on balancing rapid expansion with quality standards, financial equity for existing institutions and talent retention.
Some 9,000 doctors graduate from Indonesia's universities each year, according to the government's own figures. Assuming no retirements, closing its stated shortfall of 140,000 general practitioners at that rate would take more than 15 years.
Rather than expanding its existing medical schools, Indonesia's flagship initiative is to build ten new university campuses from scratch with a focus on high-demand fields including STEM and health sciences. It is intended to both address doctor shortages and train future leaders for positions in the government and state-owned enterprises.
The ten campuses are collectively known as the University of the Republic of Indonesia (URI), though what they will actually look like is still being worked out. The government is still conducting land inspections prior to construction, but President Prabowo Subianto believes the first students could arrive as early as 2028.
URI sits under the Golden Indonesia 2045 vision, a national strategy to become a high-income economy by the centennial of independence. Transnational education is one of its pillars.
For Indonesia, TNE is a route to expanding capacity and raising quality without sending more students abroad. The country's ventures in the area over recent years have led to increased interest in Indonesia compared with more mature markets such as Singapore and Malaysia.
Partners and funding
To deliver its URI plan, Indonesia is looking abroad with the UK as its primary partner. In January, President Prabowo met with representatives from 24 leading British universities, including Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial College London, to discuss partnering with the Russell Group universities as a long-term investment.
He subsequently discussed joint opportunities with a delegation from Imperial College London, covering curriculum development, teaching standards, joint research programmes and the placement of visiting international professors.
Higher Education Minister Brian Yuliarto has said Indonesia’s cooperation efforts with the UK will focus on "quality and substance" rather than administrative accreditation. International accreditation will be pursued gradually as the campuses produce their first graduates, meaning the earliest cohort will not graduate with an internationally accredited degree. This caveat may also affect mobility: without internationally recognised degrees, URI graduates could face barriers to practising abroad.
Other overseas partnerships are already taking shape. Talks with Germany on expanding university partnerships are underway, including joint degree programmes, doctoral programmes and joint research funding in food security, renewable energy and digitalisation. In February, German ambassador Ralf Beste named student exchange as a top priority for the German Embassy in Jakarta and said he expected Indonesian university rectors to formalise institutional agreements and deepen research ties following a visit by the DAAD president.
Australia has moved quickly, too. In May, the Australian Embassy in Jakarta hosted a landmark TNE Connect Symposium that brought together more than 30 Australian and Indonesian institutions. To mark the third decade of their collaboration, the University of Melbourne and Universitas Gadjah Mada launched three dual-degree programmes.
Students will spend part of their degree at each university, graduating with qualifications from both, in agriculture, communications or public health. Deakin University Lancaster University Indonesia, a joint venture between a UK and an Australian university, opened its Bandung campus in early 2025.
Alongside these international partnerships, the government is pursuing domestic reforms as part of the same strategy. Research funding has been increased substantially. In January 2026, President Prabowo raised the research budget ceiling to 12 trillion rupiah (US$67 thousand), up from 8 trillion rupiah the previous year. By April, the Ministry of Higher Education, Science and Technology announced that over 18,000 research and development projects across the country had benefited from 1.7 trillion rupiah in state funding.
Separately, the ministry aims to raise the gross enrolment ratio for higher education to 38 percent by 2029 from 32 percent in 2024. Much of its ability to reach that goal depends on private universities expanding access to high school graduates, according to its director of institutional affairs.
Yet private institutions face significantly more financial hurdles than their state-funded peers. Funding imbalance between public and private institutions has long existed, as Indonesia’s more than 2,800 private universities rely almost entirely on tuition fees.
On the other hand, state universities receive the bulk of government support, including access to the KIP Kuliah scholarship scheme. Indonesia’s plans to make state universities tuition-free could further divert applications away from private universities, threatening their financial sustainability.
The result is a system trying to expand access and build new institutions while existing universities are still grappling with uneven quality and funding.
URI: A contested model
Not everybody is convinced that URI is the right model. Dhia Al Uyun, a lecturer at Brawijaya University, argues that the project risks deviating from academic independence, which she describes as a basic principle of organising higher education in Indonesia.
Eko Prasojo, Professor of Public Administration at Universitas Indonesia, points out that placing LAN, the country's non-ministerial government agency, under URI would conflict with the State Civil Apparatus Law, which mandates that the agency be placed under the Administrative and Bureaucratic Reform Ministry. Regulation drafting on URI's establishment "appears to lack transparency," he says.
The Association of Indonesian Private Universities (APTISI) has called for a temporary halt in the construction of URI, citing a lack of assessment, public consultation and cost-benefit analysis. Its chairman, Budi Djatmiko, warns that URI could pull students away from private institutions rather than expand the nation's student pool.
In July, Wahyudi Askar, Director of Public Policy at the Center of Economic and Law Studies (CELIOS), wrote to the Russell Group, urging it to reconsider its involvement. According to him, Indonesia already has over 4,000 higher education institutions — representing a higher density than Japan, Australia or the UK, at about one per 66,000 people. Yet many are operating below capacity, he argues.
Ministry figures lend weight to that view. Only about six percent of these institutions hold the highest “A” or “excellent” accreditation status, while 67 percent of universities stand at the “C” or “good” level, according to Mukhamad Najib, the Ministry of Higher Education, Science and Technology’s Director of Institutional Affairs.
Besides concerns over quality assurance, the introduction of URI has raised a broader question: whether such a massive state-funded project is even necessary.
CELIOS deems URI a drain on public funds that could otherwise strengthen existing institutions. It estimates the project will require around 113 trillion rupiah (US$6.3 million) for infrastructure, scholarships and operating costs, while public universities continue to struggle with funding constraints.
The brain-drain dilemma
There is another reason why building more universities may not, by itself, solve Indonesia's healthcare workforce shortage: the people they train still need reasons to stay.
Health Ministry data shows that Indonesia has just 0.62 doctors per 1,000 people. Ministry spokesperson Mohammad Syahril describes the paradox: Indonesian doctors abroad serve populations that already have enough doctors, while Indonesia goes without.
Between 2019 and 2023, Indonesia sent roughly 7,600 healthcare workers to 14 countries through official migration channels, with more than 3,600 of them nurses deployed to Japan. Those who leave point to low wages at home, red tape in getting licences recognised, poor medical equipment and limited research budgets.
In a bid to draw that talent back, the government has begun experimenting with initiatives such as the Sanur Health Special Economic Zone in Bali, where internationally trained medical specialists can now practise under licences restricted to the zone.
Yet the pipeline that produces healthcare workers remains under strain. Before practising independently, medical graduates must complete a year-long housemanship while earning between 3.2 million and 6.4 million rupiah (US$184 to US$368) monthly, below the minimum wage in some areas. The Indonesian Medical Association has logged 2,920 complaints about housemanship programmes since 2023, ranging from excessive hours to extortion.
The pressure on the medical pipeline is one symptom of a wider problem: Indonesia's higher education system is expanding faster than its capacity to guarantee quality. That tension is what makes URI both ambitious and contested.
What to watch
The scale of Indonesia's ambition is undeniable. But reliance on foreign partners could create new dependencies, while the existing system still faces uneven quality, limited research capacity and funding constraints. Retention may ultimately be the test that determines whether the government’s investment pays off at home or abroad.
For a system that has long struggled to match its economic weight with academic output, the money, the partners and the reform agenda now point in the same direction. The goal is to translate that ambition into a higher education system that not only produces more graduates, but gives them good reasons to build their futures in Indonesia.
MEET THE AUTHOR
Michelle Zhu is a former correspondent at the breaking news desk at The Business Times in Singapore, where she mainly covered corporate announcements, including financial earnings, mergers & acquisitions, and board changes. Prior to that, she was part of the editorial team at the Singapore arm of The Edge, a Malaysia-headquartered financial weekly. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in communications and new media from the National University of Singapore.