THE number of college-aged Indonesians pursuing higher education is still low. The university enrolment rate among 19-24-year-olds in Indonesia is only about 17.26 percent, far lower than in the Philippines whose college students number about 28 percent, or in Malaysia where students are almost 40 percent of that age group.

At present, there about 4.3 million college students in Indonesia. Most of them go to private universities (2.3 million),