The United States will spend $165-million over the next five years on programs to help strengthen higher education in Indonesia through educational exchanges and university partnerships, President Obama and Indonesia's president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, announced Sunday at a meeting at the G-20 summit in Toronto.
The two leaders also agreed to hold a joint higher-education summit next summer.
Cooperative work on higher education is a key pillar of the bilateral relationship between the two countries, with the United States working to expand higher-education opportunities in the fast-growing Muslim-majority democracy. Although the Indonesian government now spends 20 percent of its budget on education, with most of those funds going to primary and secondary education, the country lacks the capacity to meet its educational needs.
"A country without a better higher-education system won't be successful and satisfied in the 21st century," says Cameron R. Hume, U.S. ambassador to Indonesia, who has made strengthening educational partnerships between the two countries the main focus of the consulate there. "The best thing they can do to face the future is to have an informed, educated citizenry."
Battered in the Asian economic downturn of the late 1990s and beset by internal threats of terrorism, Indonesia for many years did not focus on education, Mr. Hume says. The number of Indonesians studying in the United States plummeted; just 7,500 students from that country attended American colleges during the 2008-9 academic year, according to the Institute of International Education.
The U.S. Department of State already has made educational exchanges with Indonesia through the Fulbright Program a priority. As part of the effort announced Sunday, the two countries will expand such educational exchanges through Fulbright, the Community College Initiative Program, and English-language training, among other activities.
Mr. Hume says he hopes the number of Indonesians studying in the United States will double within five years.
The two countries will also work together to improve the quality and capacity of Indonesian colleges and universities through a partnership program supporting collaboration between American and Indonesian universities, says a White House news release.
And the U.S. government invited the Indonesian minister of national education to the United States next summer for a U.S.-Indonesia Higher Education Summit to "advance cooperation."
Mr. Obama, who spent part of his childhood in Indonesia, had been scheduled to visit Indonesia earlier this month, but the trip was postponed so the president could deal with the Gulf Coast oil spill.
Comments
1. oiastaff - June 28, 2010 at 01:02 pm
I tried three times to forward this message to colleagues involved in Indonesia without success.
2. raymond_j_ritchie - June 29, 2010 at 05:07 am
Most commendable but a little late but better late than never. Indonesia is politically, culturally and strategically very important and anything to arrest or reverse the drift into a Middle Eastern sphere of influence is good for Western interests and for Indonesia.
Australia has had higher education programs operating in Indonesia for a very long time. Generally the results have been positive but never spectacularly successful. Nevertheless, a substantial proportion of the elites in Malaysia and Indonesia either have an Australian university education or send their children here. On the down-side Malay (Indonesian and Malaysian) culture is noticeably less hospitable to westerners than it used to be. For example, Australian academics naturally expect their former students to visit them when they visit Australia and used to expect similar hospitality from their malay students and colleagues when they visited SE-Asia. Nowadays there is a great deal of pressure to polish ones Islamic credentials in Malaysia and Indonesia, particularly if you are employed by the government. Having a westerner come and visit you does not confer the status it used to. They are now more inclined to put you up in a hotel rather than offer you household hospitality and only want to be seen with you on a campus or a similar situation. Do not be offended: your malay hosts may feel that they have no choice but to be more aloof than they would want to be. The situation is quite different in Thailand where having a western visitor, particularly their PhD supervisor or a co-author on a paper, confers a great deal of status on your host.