Govt to attract students to natural sciences

With fewer and fewer people taking university degrees in the natural sciences, the national Education Ministry is working on ways to attract more students.

“High school graduates today are not interested in studying agriculture, animal husbandry or fishery; these majors are not popular anymore,” a senior official at the Education Ministry, Hendarman, told a discussion recently.

Some universities, he added, had even had to close their agriculture courses because not a single student wanted to take them.

The phenomenon, he said, was ironic, considering Indonesia was an agricultural country.

Academic director at the directorate general of higher education, Illah Sailah, said Monday the declining trend in people applying to major in the natural sciences had actually started in 2004.

“It will be our country’s loss if no one studies these subjects. Who will manage our natural resources then?” she said.

To address the problem, the ministry is looking at ways to attract more students to study agriculture.

“Perhaps by changing the name of the subject into something more interesting,” Hendarman said, adding that “agribusiness classes” have more participants, although they are not that different from agriculture classes.

Soil Science, Agriculture, Cultivation, and Pest and Disease majors are merged into the category of agrotechnology while Agriculture, Social Economics, and Communication and Counselingclasses are combined into the agribusiness course.

“By doing this, we aim to achieve different learning outcomes; we want graduates with general skills that are comprehensive, and not the specific skills regular agriculture classes offer now,” Illah told The Jakarta Post.

“Besides, industry requires graduates to have the skills to manage everything, from upstream to downstream, so we are trying to respond to the market’s signals,” she said.

Hendarman said a lot of agriculture or fishery graduates do not work in their specific fields of knowledge.

“Rather, most of them are now working as employees in banks, or as journalists, or in other fields,” he said, adding that Indonesia still has a high unemployment rate.

The country is seeing an increase in the number of people who have university diplomas but are unemployed. In 2008 the number increased by 42 percent to 1 million compared with the figure for 2005. Illah said that the ministry was also revitalizing the agricultural courses. “We started giving grants to 29 universities this year so they can renew or add to their educational resources and equipment,” she said, adding that each university receives between Rp 400 million (US$40,400) to Rp 900 million. Rector of the University of Indonesia Gumilar Rusliwa Somantri said his university has also seen a decline in the number of applicants for natural science majors, however he had another way to attract students. “We try to entice them by offering scholarship opportunities,” he said, without going into detail as to the number of scholars the university had accepted(source: the Jakarta Post)