At the First All-Russia Congress of Educators, Lenin made a speech saying that the more cultured a bourgeois country is, the more refined it lies when stating that education can stand above politics and serve society as a whole. The fact is that schools have turned into mere instruments of the bourgeois class order. Education is fully imbued with the spirit of the bourgeois caste. And that “We say that our tasks in the field of education are part of the struggle to overthrow the bourgeoisie. We openly declare that education apart from life and politics is lies and hypocrisy.” There are two major goals in education under Capitalism namely for what Lenin called "supplying the capitalists with obedient and skilled labor" and for education itself to become a commodity. When the working class is exploited by their work, students (parents) continue to be exploited to pay for higher education which is increasingly expensive. This paper tries to describe how higher education in Indonesia has become a commodity.
During the Soeharto Military Regime, higher education was used to strengthen the grip of the regime. Especially after the 1978 student movement, processes of depoliticization, ideology and demobilization began to be implemented on campus. The campus is demilitarized while the doctrine of "development" is included in the curriculum as well as P4 Upgrading (Guidelines for Living and Practicing Pancasila is encouraged. All of this is to build support for "development", to exaggerate the role of the armed forces and not allow space for social change.
What we also need to look at are the foundations that are created and provide scholarships, such as the Supersemar Foundation. Various foundations created by Soeharto were hotbeds for corruption. Foundations are used to get away from taxes, to annex strategic companies, to solicit donations from conglomerates and high-ranking officials including mandatory donations from state banks.
Along with industrial growth in the 1980s, the Suharto Military Regime introduced Diploma programs as well as the Technical Middle School or High School of Economics. In the 1990s, the Minister of Education and Culture Wardiman Djojonegoro gave rise to a link and match education discourse that oriented higher education to industrial needs.
Formed in 1995, the World Trade Organization (WTO) was created to promote liberalization and free trade. Education is included in one of the liberalized service sectors. The Suharto Military Regime supported and was involved in the establishment of the WTO through Law No. 7 of 1994. In the same year the World Bank or World Bank program penetrated the world of education. The project is called University Research for Graduate Education (URGE). This project was continued with other projects namely, Development of Undergraduate Education (DUE), Quality of Undergraduate Education (QUE). This was followed by a project sponsored by UNESCO, the Higher Educations for Competitiveness Project (HECP). This HECP later evolved into Indonesia Managing Higher Education for Relevance and Efficiency (IMHERE). These projects are implemented not for charitable or charitable purposes but to liberalize education.
The process of relinquishing state responsibility in the world of education for higher education in Indonesia has begun to manifest in education policies issued by the government after the reform, such as: Government Regulation (PP) No. 61 of 1999 concerning Higher Education (PT) State-Owned Legal Entities (BHMN), Law (UU) of the National Education System (Sisdiknas) of 2003, Decree (SK) of the Directorate General (Dirjen) of Higher Education (Dikti) No. 28/DIKTI/Kep/2002 concerning the implementation of non-regular programs at State Universities (PTN), PP No. 23 of 2005 concerning the implementation of the Public Service Agency (BLU) financial pattern for PTN, Regulation of the Minister of National Education (Permendiknas) No. 2 of 2005 concerning Cross Subsidies of Higher Education Operational Costs, PP no. 48 2008 concerning Education Funding, the Education Legal Entity Law (BHP) of 2009 (however canceled after encountering a lot of resistance and lawsuits), and finally Law no. 12 of 2012 concerning Higher Education (UU DIKTI), with its derivatives namely Single Tuition Fee (BKT) and Single Tuition Fee (UKT) through the Minister of Education and Culture Regulation (Permendikbud) no. 55 of 2013. PTNs are 'forced' to use a more flexible, autonomous, performance-based financial management system, and others.
UKT which is said to open access to education for everyone with a cross-subsidy scheme. Meanwhile, the Minister of Research, Technology and Higher Education, Mohamad Nasir, together with campus bureaucrats, continue to maintain that UKT is the best way. They said that the UKT would not be increased, including providing a solution with a scholarship.
But in fact, the various UKT methods continue to cause problems. Like hitting the average, all students are required to pay the entrance fee that has been accumulated. UKT management is not transparent. How to measure the economic ability of a student's family correctly or when the student's family is in trouble and needs UKT relief. Education costs also continue to rise because the UKT count also includes campus operational costs. Meanwhile, the quota for UKT 1 and 2 groups, which are generally in the category of lower middle class student families, is only 10 percent and is narrowed to study programs that lack interest.
It's already expensive, the hope that it's easy to get a job with high wages and become more intellectual is also not achieved. JobsDB, a job seeker portal, said that more than 66 thousand new graduates in Indonesia are not absorbed by companies and have the potential to become unemployed, while the number of new graduates each year reaches around 250 thousand. Based on data from the Central Statistics Agency (BPS) in August 2014, there were 9.5 percent (688,660 people) of the total unemployed who were university alumni. They have a diploma or bachelor's degree (S 1). Of this number, the highest number of unemployed were university graduates with bachelor's degrees , which reached 495,143 people. It continues to increase from year to year, in 2013 it was 8.36 percent (619,288 people) and in 2012 it was 8.79 percent (645,866 people).
Meanwhile the world of work is not as beautiful as imagined. The system of contract work and outsourcing as well as politics of low wages is rampant everywhere. The same situation has actually occurred in the academic world itself. The system of contract work, outsourcing, honorarium and even unclear work relations based on patronage of campus bureaucratic elites. On the other hand the wages and job security are far from decent. Campus workers, whether they are administrative workers, security guards or cleaning services, researchers and even lecturers receive wages that are far below the minimum wage or even wage deductions. There is no social security such as health, work accident or old age insurance.
Campus bureaucrats accept as many students as possible without expelling them first and as quickly as possible (read: graduation). This is often done without providing and increasing the number of teaching staff and campus workforce as well as adequate facilities, infrastructure and facilities. As a result, for teaching staff the workload increases, the ratio of teaching staff is not balanced with the number of students, teaching hours are longer, more work is taken home, while there is no increase in income or adequate benefits. Meanwhile for students, class hours are getting busier, assignments are increasing, lecture halls are getting crowded, schedule clashes and make-up classes or follow-up classes are becoming more frequent, time for organizations is getting limited, and even that is being narrowed down with various restrictions such as curfews.
