Fourier’s GR-1 humanoid robots are displayed on Thursday during the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai, China, on July 4, 2024. (AFP/AFP)
Quaternary education is the fourth level of education following an undergraduate degree, or to put it simply, postgraduate study.
Asia School of Business CEO Sanjay Sarma said Indonesia needed to develop the quaternary education sector in the country to better equip the working- age population against generational challenges.
Quaternary education is the fourth level of education following an undergraduate degree, or to put it simply, postgraduate study.
“Technology changes so fundamentally, AI’s [artificial intelligence] impact on the economy is going to be very significant, and that’s not the only technology that’s changing the economy,” he told The Jakarta Post on Aug. 1, saying that the quaternary system had huge potential because everyone was migrating jobs.
“Even biotech is changing the economy in ways that you probably don’t realize. So the rest of the world is also struggling. But Indonesia has an opportunity […] because of its demographic dividend. So it’s gold. Invest in a gold mine.”
Most Indonesians do not go to universities, with roughly 30 percent of the population having studied at this level, according to Statistics Indonesia data from 2023. Elementary to senior high school fared better, with between 86 and 100 percent participation.
Tertiary and quaternary education have been largely limited to households within the highest tier out of five expenditure groups in Indonesia, with participation reaching over 50 percent, whereas those from the lowest tier only saw around 17 percent gaining a university-level education, according to Statistics Indonesia data.
However, Sarma said “money is not the issue” when it comes to innovating education, but vision.
“A good university is going to act like a start-up. It’s a mentality. It’s the entrepreneurial mindset where you’re probing the unknown,” he said, suggesting Indonesia adopt a two-pronged strategy to develop its quaternary education secretary.
First, the country could start with exploratory and experimental licenses as well as incentives “to change the game” in the educational system, Sarma said. Second, the government could take a couple of public universities and create sandboxes.
“Where they change the game, where they create a program that is within, where they teach engineering completely differently. This is a known model,” he explained.
“Start-ups and education are intertwined. Behave like a start- up, use technology created by start-ups, create start-ups.”
Living MIT graduates who have started and built for-profit companies do not qualify as a nation. However, if they did, they’d be the world’s 10th largest economy, with gross revenue ranking between Russia and India’s GDP of $2.097 trillion and $1.877 trillion, respectively, according to a report released by MIT in 2015.
As of 2014, the report estimates, MIT alumni have launched 30,200 active companies, employing roughly 4.6 million people, and generating roughly $1.9 trillion in annual revenue.
Originally published by The Jakarta Post.