See also: Requiem For Foreign Aid ,

HEDS Up in Indonesia
by Frank Stephenson

An FSU-led mission to reform Indonesian universities speaks volumes for the cause for U.S. aid to struggling nations.

In so many ways, to be born in Indonesia these days is to be born luckier than any generation in the island nation’s long and colorful history.

Jack and Jerry

Never before have young people in this vast, steaming marinescape of 17,000 islands faced life with as many options and personal freedom as they do today. To be sure, the government of the 52-year-old nation--freed from Dutch control at the end of World War II--is still in the grips of an authoritarian and at times brutal regime. But since the collapse of the USSR seven years ago, a largely socialist order operating as a family business since 1967 by President Suharto has been gravitating toward a marginally freer, less-centralized society. Today, this improbably diverse nation of nearly 200 million inhabitants--the fourth largest nation on earth--is pulsing to an ever-steadier beat of world commerce with the fastest-growing middle class in the Far East.

In a land of stunning contrasts--young business execs in Jakarta, the capital city, survive on E-mail and the Internet while their counterparts 3,000 miles away kill supper with handmade spears--recent socio-economic changes have been equally mind-boggling. Consider that in 1992, fully 70 percent of the working class drew a paycheck from the government, typically in dead-end career service jobs artificially created just to keep people employed. Today, 65 percent of all salaried workers in Indonesia are employed by private businesses--a dramatic shift that not surprisingly is causing a variety of headaches for a government still not quite sure what to make of it all.

But the pains weren’t entirely unexpected by a Suharto government whose 30-year stability can as much as anything be credited to the absence of an allegiance to any hidebound ideology. With the Soviet collapse as a brisk wake-up call, the government assessed Indonesia’s economic future and saw glaring deficiencies that cried out for remedies, and from any quarter.

Among the most egregious inequities brought to light was the comparative worth of a degree from the average Indonesian university in the dawning of a global economy. Assessments showed clearly that Indonesian graduates were woefully ill-prepared to compete against bright young foreigners for dazzling new job opportunities--particularly in science and technology--that were popping open all across the archipelago.

Not lost on the government, too, was a growing resentment among the residents of outlying regions-- principally the islands of Sumatra and Kalimantan (formerly Borneo) and the island-cluster province of Riau--over what clearly had become an inequitable distribution of tax benefits. For years, the various far-flung provinces had complained that they were getting the short end of a highly centralized system that concentrated tax monies--and thus public services such as education--in Java, the seat of government. Oil-rich Riau province figured to have a major beef, kicking in the U.S. equivalent of $20 for every $1 it got back in government services.

A history of such unbalanced return-on-investment had effectively stagnated educational opportunities in the outlying islands while Javanese education thrived. As a consequence, every year thousands of the best students from the perimeters of the country converge on Java universities, inflicting a brain- and manpower drain on the parts of the nation that can least afford it.

Thus, with both political and economic considerations at stake, the Suharto government suddenly became eager to step up efforts aimed at educational reform.

FSU Gets the Call

Indonesia’s traditional sources of foreign assistance--dating back to 1957--principally have been the U.S., Britain, the Netherlands and various world lending institutions. Such aid has gone for a host of internal improvement projects, ranging from agricultural reform to pollution control. Most of the support for educational reform has come from international lending organizations, such as the World Bank.

America has been a major player, however. In the past 40 years, nearly 12,000 Indonesians have earned advanced degrees at American universities, largely on the strength of U.S. foreign aid. To help fund its newest resolve to revamp its higher education system, in 1991 the Indonsian government sought help from a consortium of foreign relief agencies, principally from Japan and the U.S., that would in effect be a continuation of work begun years earlier by the U.S.

For a five-year project, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Japanese International Cooperation Agency responded with commitments of $20 million each, which was added to $14 million in support from the Indonesian government. (Midway through the project, the Japanese added $15 million, almost doubling the U.S. commitment.)

Florida State University’s Center for International Studies (CIS), a part of the university’s Learning Systems Institute, sought and won an $8 million portion of the USAID project in 1992. FSU’s "we deliver" reputation at USAID had once again paid off, says current CIS Director Dr. Jack Bock (Ph.D. Stanford). Since 1984, the FSU center had been the leader of a 10-year, $58 million USAID project involving 15 nations, the largest and most ambitious educational development effort in the agency’s history. Indonesia had been one of the 15 countries in the massive project that concluded in 1994.

"That project easily showed what we were capable of," said Bock, who first began work in Indonesia in 1970 as an employee of the Ford Foundation. "We were familiar with the language, culture and government in Indonesia and felt confident about working there again."

But before the FSU team could crank up for the latest Indonesian project called HEDS (for Higher Education Development Support), political squabbles in Washington almost scuttled it. Strident attacks on foreign aid by powerful conservative elements in Congress held up funding for the project for six months. The delay triggered hang-ups in preparation, which cost the FSU-led team a full year before getting fully deployed in the field. A terribly complicated job originally designed to take five years now had to be done in three.

Where to Start

Going in, the FSU/HEDS team members had done their homework and had a reasonably good idea of what they’d find--a fundamentally dysfunctional system of higher education. Indonesia’s top-down style of management not only drove government bureaucracies in Java but permeated the scattered university system as well. A severe shortage of high-quality middle-level managers throughout public life (the good ones take off for high-paying jobs in industry) had stymied productivity and efficiency at every level of government.

Many of the nation’s universities were universities in name only, victims of a bloated career-service system that had produced an entrenched cadre of administrators, staff and teachers--all paid paltry salaries, albeit for life--who, not surprisingly, had little incentive to perform well or to improve. A get-serious attempt to overhaul the system begun in 1990 by Indonesia’s Ministry of Education typified governmental short-sightedness: Dozens of new institutions were built, others--mostly old polytechnic centers--were refurbished, and simply by decree all were made four-year universities with little thought to curricular or logistical details. (Today, the country advertises the existence of 48 state and more than 1,500 private universities--yet few offer Ph.D.s.)

A series of in-country baseline studies conducted by HEDS’ American and Indonesian advisors soon painted the full, bleak picture. The 120-plus member team faced a management crisis of the first order, where the end products were students holding bachelors degrees barely worth the paper they were printed on. Although the study focused on nine universities on the island of Sumatra, 11 others from Kalimantan to Riau were assessed. The targeted 20 included both public and private universities. All showed varying degrees of institutional paralysis, where largely universally accepted concepts of internal management, accountability, curriculum development, classroom instruction, and faculty training were scantily developed if not missing entirely.

Canvassing the campuses on Sumatra and elsewhere, the HEDS team found what Bock and others described as "shells or semi-shells"-- clusters of handsome buildings, full of nice furnishings, well-equipped laboratories and little else. Classrooms, administrative offices and labs sat empty during some of what outsiders would typically think to be the most productive hours of every day.

Particularly disturbing was the state of the university’s libraries. Every campus had a library building, but few contained many books, and often these were hopelessly outdated. Dr. Paul C. Parker, chief academic officer for Florida’s community college system, was hired by FSU to be "chief of party," or the in-field chief administrator for HEDS, was appalled by what he saw at one university in Sumatra.

"The government had just spent $10 million building a fine library there," he recalls. "But it held only about 5,000 books, and the newest one was five years old. The administration then spent $75,000 on a security system for this collection. The money would have been much better spent on more books."

Science labs he saw provided further proof of a system completely out of sync. The labs were often barren of supplies, such as common laboratory chemicals, but nonetheless arrayed with sophisticated instruments, most of which were donated by British and German companies.

"But for the most part no one knew how to use the equipment," said Parker. "And if you did use it and it broke down, that was a major problem. There were no technicians for making repairs, no repair schedule of any kind, no lab management at all."

On the human side, HEDS researchers found an abysmal lack of qualified staff and instructors everywhere they looked. Teachers ill-suited to the task, much less capable of doing anything resembling first-class research and scholarship, were the norm as were indifferent or incompetent staff members. The lack of qualified manpower, coupled with a bureaucratic mindset that crippled even the simplest administrative services--such as showing up at a prescribed hour to open an office or lab--proved to be a ubiquitous obstacle that would dog the HEDS project from the outset.

"From the start we knew that there was only so much we could do-- given the time and resources we had--to improve a system that needed to be radically changed from the inside out," said Parker. "But in the end, we delivered everything called for in the contract."

Faculty Woes

It had fallen to the American segment of the HEDS project to concentrate on improving curricula and instruction in math, science and business management, while the Japanese partners were to focus on technology and engineering. The USAID team’s mission also included doing what it could to improve staff and teacher training and the internal management of the universities--something the government readily acknowledged needed attention--and to help set up job placement and counseling centers on campus.

The latter--a virtual staple of any Western university worthy of the name--remained a genuine novelty on Indonesian campuses, where oddly enough the connection between academic training and careers had for the most part never been completely made by either the administration or faculty. But the Indonesian government had been listening to complaints by the country’s rapidly growing influx of foreign capitalists who insisted that Indonesian graduates lacked the basic skills they needed to be productive in the private sector. Better attention needed to be paid to matching what students learned in class and what prospective, non-government employers were looking for.

It was precisely what students learned--and tragically didn’t--in class that bothered HEDS advisors more than anything they encountered, said Parker. Career skills aside, the universities’ entire approach to higher education impressed HEDS technical advisors with an apparent lack of concern for instilling basic, pedagogical principles and concepts in faculty and staff.

No better example was the discovery early on that most math and science teachers in Sumatra and the outlying islands had only undergraduate degrees. Fewer than 25 percent had training beyond a bachelors degree, and almost all of the faculty--regardless of training--relied on antiquated class materials and teaching methods.

"We found the teachers to be terribly ill-prepared, using poor notes they’d taken as undergraduates often in the same class," said Parker. "Rote memorization was the preferred teaching method, with little learning-by-doing. And no textbooks, or very few of them."

The latter problem touched on a profound observation made by HEDS’ advisors: In contrast to Western cultures, Indonesia is largely a bookless society.

"As it turns out, Indonesia by and large is not a reading culture," said Parker. "We found that neither students nor their teachers habitually read, which helps explain why the university libraries are in such bad shape."

Only in recent years have literacy rates in Indonesia reached high levels, which Parker believes may be a consequence of older generations not having access to reading materials or being neglected in elementary schools. Even today, neither elementary or secondary education across the nation puts strong emphasis on reading, he said.

"At the university level, teachers simply don’t assign readings. Everything is imparted orally. So with no reading assignments, there’s no justification for improving the libraries, which means that few books that are there tend to stay outdated."

Teachers’ attitudes, too, were problematic. The baseline study showed that many faculty displayed a lack of interest in self-improvement--whether through extended training or self-study--and a general disinterest in the welfare of their students. The career-service, job-for-life mentality was blamed for much of this, said Parker.

"Too many teachers had the attitude that they did not have to do anything, even show up for work, as they would be paid their terribly low wages anyway," Parker eventually wrote in the project’s final report.

Poor salaries, as it became increasingly obvious, were a major contributor to faculty malaise. On average, Indonesia’s university faculty earn less than $100 (U.S.) per month, but then that’s in a country that in 1994 had a per capita income of $884. As a consequence, teachers often found it necessary to "moonlight" to make ends meet, said Parker. Some took the practice to extremes, working so much elsewhere that they wound up spending as little as two hours a week in a classroom, one study showed.

In sum, the HEDS team found no shortage of reasons why the universities under study were suffering. An insidious combination of problems had generated a defeatist attitude among university personnel at all levels, a sense of futility toward trying to improve in the face of pervasive, long-standing political and economic travails.

Within the first few weeks of the project, the situation had become clear to a sympathetic HEDS staff. If they did nothing else, they already had identified a crippling morale crisis. In doing so, to hundreds of well-meaning Indonesian educators they had become the only source of hope for change.

Job Corps, Indonesian-Style

By 1994, Indonesia’s economy was on a roll. While still largely agrarian--with huge agricultural, forest and fishery industries--the nation’s economy was becoming increasingly diversified. That year, the country was doing $44 billion in business with U.S. firms alone--$12 billion of which was in oil.

Jakarta had become recognized as an international city, a bustling center of global enterprise. A building glut was well under way, thanks to rampant speculation on the wants and needs of a ballooning consumer society. Young people in steadily increasing numbers were shunning guaranteed jobs in government offices for higher-paying, though riskier, careers in business.

Characteristically, the last segment of public life to catch on to what the transition meant--or should mean--was the university system. A government initiative called "Link and Match" launched in 1991 sought to sell to the universities on the idea that Indonesian higher education should be tailored toward meeting the manpower needs of an expanding economy (naturally offering few details on how to do it). A HEDS study in 1993 showed that rank-and-file teachers and students had only fuzzy notions of the concept. Most students placed little importance on acquiring skills or knowledge that would make them more competitive in the new job market. Further, they found such things as career planning and job placement services faintly puzzling. What was the need when the future meant a government pension?

"We found ourselves in the position of selling what is essentially an American concept to a very skeptical audience," Parker recalled. The challenge became one of opening a door to a culture largely naive to a socio-economic revolution already well under way throughout the Indonesian heartland.

With this sobering realization, HEDS advisors tackled the problem first by holding dozens of staff training sessions in Sumatra, trying to build a corps of qualified people to get the job placement centers up and running. Then, agreements with local businesses were reached, forging lines of communication between Sumatran campuses and local industries--something entirely unheard of.

"A major oil company, CALTEX, in Riau, was literally in sight of a university, and yet there had never been any attempt made by the university or the company to communicate," says Bock. "CALTEX was going to Jakarta to interview graduates for petroleum jobs right there in Riau."

Considering what they were up against, HEDS staffers figured if they could get two or three job placement centers working reasonably well, the effort could be called a successful demonstration project. For one thing, much of the centers’ staffs were going to be hastily trained people--mostly Indonesians--who were volunteering for the jobs. For another, the effort would be starting from scratch, with no precedents to draw from and few resources, either on campus or off. In many cases, establishing links to local businesses would mean setting up chambers of commerce where none ever existed--a daunting task in itself.

When the HEDS project wrapped up last year, 13 of the 20 targeted universities had job placement centers up and running, most offering a full range of services, including career counseling, training in English and computer skills, resumé writing and interviewing techniques. For a "demonstration project" initially expected to attract 1,000 students, the centers were being mobbed. All told, by the time the HEDS team left in June, more than 20,000 students had signed up for the centers’ help. More than 500 graduates found private-sector jobs using center guidance, and another 500 found paying internships, an entirely novel concept before HEDS.

By 1994, the centers’ phenomenal growth had caught the government’s attention which released funds to six of the most promising to pay for office equipment and travel. Since then, centers at the universities of North Sumatra, Riau, and Lampung have become virtually self-sustaining, selling their services for modest fees. The University of Riau, in fact, applied for and won a $400,000 grant from the World Bank to further develop its job placement center.

"These three universities have become the pathfinders, the leaders of the job-placement, career-planning movement throughout Indonesian higher education," says Parker. "They’ve become models that can be easily exported to other countries wanting to start such centers."

Class Act

The stunning success of the job placement centers, despite all odds, figured to bode well for HEDS initiatives in beefing up the quality of classroom instruction. Unfortunately, positive results proved to be considerably more elusive on this front. Restrictions on how the USAID grant money could be used precluded buying books or classroom materials or for staff computers, copying machines or any other equipment. Funding could be used only for hiring people.

"This handicapped us initially," said Parker. "We were tasked with reforming curriculum and instruction, yet we had no money for supplies or equipment. That’s like telling someone to run a race with no legs."

Eventually, the project’s Japanese partners supplied the HEDS offices with computers and other equipment, and by the middle of the project some U.S. funds were freed for the purchase of books and other materials. Redesigned curricula and teaching aids soon were ready for a series of pilot courses, where they made an almost immediate impact, Parker said. HEDS advisors saw a sudden jump in improvement both in teaching and in student comprehension in math and science.

Still, a lack of adequate resources from the outset stymied efforts to introduce the reforms on a wider front. Even so, Parker said that hundreds of university teachers and students were given their first taste of high-quality education. By the time the project ended, they would be clamoring for more.

Too Soon Gone

Like a surgical strike--in the parlance of the modern U.S. military--the HEDS project was designed to make a strong impact with no thought to a long-term commitment. For a five-year project shrunk by political realities to three, HEDS succeeded remarkably, argue Bock and Parker.

For the first time, a major segment of Indonesian higher education glimpsed possibilities it never knew existed. Beleaguered administrators were introduced to flexible ways to counter an autocratic system, ushering in the hopes of more autonomy and control over budgeting, personnel, and a host of other management problems. They learned what a little professional training and guidance could do for staff, how it could stimulate productivity, efficiency and morale.

On a higher plane, they and their faculty were exposed to fundamental tenets of education that prompted them to think critically about nearly everything they did, said Parker. It was a revelation to many.

"As one of our advisors put it, when we started, the (teachers) didn’t know that they didn’t know (about how to improve quality), and therefore they didn’t care," he said. "Now they know just a little of what they don’t know and that’s made them hungry to know more."

Unlike other overseas projects he’s worked on, which tend to wind down in the final weeks, he said that HEDS closed with a bang. "As we were walking out of the offices, the phones were ringing off the hook. In a real sense, it was a tragedy we had to leave when we did."

Admitting that the project "only made a dent" in solving intractable problems besetting Indonesian higher education--many of which, such as paltry teacher salaries, can be corrected only through wholesale political and economic change--Parker and Bock feel confident that HEDS made its mark.

A plus that came out of being forced to put a period on things was that the staff worked harder to give the Indonesians a sense of pride and ownership in what had been accomplished, vitally important for keeping the job placement centers, curriculum changes and management reform initiatives going. Whatever remains of the HEDS effort down the road will depend almost entirely on the degree to which the Indonesian partners make the new USAID tools their own and put them to work, said Parker.

"This is the thing you work for, and I think we’ve done that. We’ve developed in these institutions a sense of ownership, a sense of direction, a sense of what needs to be done."

Aborting a Mission

As hopes rise for a brighter economic future for a generation of Indonesians, rising too are the educational demands of this naturally bounteous, culturally diverse nation.

Neither half of this equation is lost on the Japanese, as evidenced by their hefty ($1.2 billion) all-inclusive foreign aid package to Indonesia last year (roughly 25 times the U.S. investment). While the Americans of the HEDS project are long gone from the field, the Japanese are still there for the most part, seeing no sense in leaving just as things are looking up. After all, the Indonesia of today is a modest trading partner compared to what the Indonesia of tomorrow figures to be, if trends hold. The Japanese tend to take the long view in providing foreign aid when there’s a yen to be made somewhere down the line, says Bock.

For their part, the U.S. leaders of the HEDS project are frustrated that strong political forces virulently opposed to U.S. foreign assistance compromised their work and forced it to end, in their minds, prematurely. "So much more needs to be done to make these universities reach their potentials of service to individuals and society," laments Parker in the final report.

After early struggles to overcome language and cultural barriers, in the final months most HEDS staff members began to see the proverbial light come on in roomfuls of eager faces. Among teachers, the staff saw a marked shift in attitude toward the need for further training. Volunteers at the busy new job placement and career-planning centers were clearly on a mission, caught up in the excitement of an aroused student body and administration.

To suddenly turn their back on such promise was tough for all involved, Parker said, but inevitable. He, Bock and their colleagues at FSU say they are resigned to the fact that often the best things that happen under the rubric of U.S. foreign aid are the very things that go unreported. Worthy USAID programs such as HEDS wind up paying for highly publicized sins elsewhere in the now seriously threatened federal agency. The upshot is that HEDS may very well prove to be the last major USAID-funded project that FSU (or any other university, for that matter) ever undertakes.

In the conclusion to his final report, Parker summed up staffers’ feelings this way:

"If those who would try to remove America from its responsibility and international obligation to help developing countries could know about projects such as HEDS and what it has meant to improving the level of higher education in a country vital to the long run self-interest of America, American aid programs would not only continue but would expand."