Quality Improvement of Indonesian University in The Face of Globalization

This article shed light on sustainable quality improvement of Indonesian universities by embracing autonomous principle as the propulsion for a more dynamic and accountable system in order to back up a reliable autonomy with accreditation to assure the quality of graduate students, and self evaluation to guarantee an apt decision making based on empirical data and information. Therefore, it is vital to reassess university vision and mission of teaching, researching, and community service, especially in the face of a more democratic globalization era sustained with science and technological development. Government, universities, and other research institutions, together with industrial sector, are highly potential to form a synergistic triangle to jointly handle internalization transfer and strategic technological development to enhance productivity and national competitiveness sustainably. Autonomy is a right or authority provided by the authorized party or government, while academic freedom is a kind of freedom owned by academicians in performing their duty and their functional activity, namely education and scientific research. The development of University accountability is meant to make the best use of university resources for activities sustaining the stated goals.


INTRODUCTION
Every citizen is entitled with the right to obtain a decent education equally with excellence and equity between access and achievement. This noble goal will surely be met when there are reliable academic activities of highly qualified academic design, educational process management resting on growth, novelty, and sustainability concept. Therefore, it is pivotal that the academic management be run professionally. Education sector becomes the backbone of many parties to produce highly qualified resources who are ready to tackle any alarming problems due to a fast paced development from the primary, junior, to senior high school [1].
Law No. 20 2003 [2] articulates that university is an academic unit which manages higher education taking the form of Academy, Polytechnic, High School, Institute, or University. Higher education principally is an attentive effort to develop students and institution level of knowledge and implementation towards the stated goals. University which serves as the ensuing educational level after the secondary education includes Diplomas, Undergraduate program, Master Program, and Doctoral Program which is managed transparently (article 19, paragraph 1-3). Meanwhile, Article 20, paragraph 1-3 declares that university which may take the form of Academy, Polytechnic, High School, Institute, or University is entitled to conduct education, research, and community service, (University Tri Dharma) and may enforce an academic program, profession and/or vocation according to the managed education programs. In addition, Article 22 puts forth that, the university with doctoral program deserves to award an honorary doctorate (doctor honoris causal) towards an eligible individual who is entitled to receive an award owing to exceptional services in the field of science, technology, social, religion, culture, or art. Government Regulation No. 30 year 1990 [3] article 1 paragraph 1 declares that Higher Education is supposed to prepare students to become a citizen with highly qualified professional academic skill who can implement, develop, and initiate science, technology, and art, and able to develop and disseminate science, technology, and art and optimize its function to improve people's life and enrich national culture [4].
Basically, Higher Education is aimed at balancing life discourse of social system directed both at intellectual rise and moral maturity which requires special approach to overcome its all related problems. This solution calls for compromise approach.
To foster human resource quality, to run after lag in many life aspects, and to adapt to global changes and development of What underlies the new change brought by the new System of Education law is among others democratization and decentralization of education, role of community, globalization challenge, equity and balance, education program, and students. In addition, another concerning actual problem such as instant title provision, false thesis making, false academic certificate, and so on have been regulated in the new law and would be regarded as criminal act which would be penalized as written in the new law of National Education System. (Chapter XX Penal Provision, article 67-71) [5].
On the basis of the foregoing background, this research aims at particularly unveiling the whole university aspect, both its function, problem, and complication in implementing its duty in the face of future challenge based on the new law of [5] and its derivative regulations. UNESCO (1996) has declared four primary pillars of education sector, that is education is predetermined to improve learning to know, learning to do, learning to be, and learning to live together. The implementation of the four pillars in Indonesian education is that the national education system is expected to prepare all the citizen to fully participate in all sectors of life in order to realize an educated, active, creative, and united nation as is written in the introduction of the National Law 1945 that every citizen of Indonesia is entitled with decent education.

RESEARCH PROBLEM
There are ten mega trends which is reconstructed in the new law of National Education System which will support the new modern industrial society namely: 1) primary education, 2) curriculum, 3) PBM, 4) teachers, 5) education, 6) training and manpower, 7) higher education, 8) sustainable education, 9) education defrayal, 10) education decentralization and community participation, and education management [6].
In this account, there are some considerable noteworthy issues in the implementation of higher education in Indonesia, one of which is the low standard quality of graduate students. This is in contrast to what is previously expected that those with high level of education will find it easier to find a job. Consequently, the phenomenon leads us to wonder why the man power with high level of education still finds it hard to meet their dream job. In fact, the level of unemployment among those with high level of education is still escalating. One of the alternative answers to this question is that because the graduate student's qualification is underrated and that their skill is irrelevant with the job demand. The high level of unemployment rate among scholars reflects fallacy in the orientation of university management. Instead of managing the intellectuality basis with which the students can learn applied skills, the university merely directs their students to learn vocational character education to meet the demand of the job market [7] .
Within a modern industrial society, higher education will turn to become highly autonomous in which it will grow highly flexible education program on the account of science and technological development. The autonomy may take the form of academic program and lecturer recruitment from the society and industrial sector as well as from foreign countries. Within a modern industrial society, university serves as the center of science and technological development. It will become the research center activities which enable the institution to become the Universe-city. [6], refers to this term as the association of experts who pay high attention in the inquiry of the entire universe with its substances and phenomenon, not to mention as the center of art and cultural phenomenon.
In the globalization era, higher education institution is expected to prepare their graduate students with required skills enabling them to work in any parts of the world with the professionalism level meeting the international standard. Higher education must create highly qualified and relevant human resources with the demand of the stakeholders. The importance of highly qualified human resources in maintaining sustainability and industrial competition lies on the fact that there has been a shift from the concern on production and labor factor to the knowledge factor, or at least to the skilled labor.
There has been an escalating gap between skilled labor and physical labor particularly on the technology-intensive industry owing to the faster pace of production cycle. This phenomenon is well signified by the rapid pace of latest technology update. Aside from this, another terrain of the labor demand in the face of globalization is the need for research and development for the development of novel products and new technology internalization into production process to maintain industrial product competitiveness in the market.
From the foregoing phenomenon in the modern industrial era, it is projected that the university with the government and industrial sector will turn out to be a synergistic triangle to jointly handle transfer, internalization, and technological development with a strategic role to foster productivity and national competitiveness sustainably.
Brojonegoro, et al, (2001) [8] states that when the new paradigm of higher education is concerned more on quality standard related to four aspects of 1) autonomy, 2) accountability, 3) accreditation and 4) evaluation with the appropriate implementation it is not impossible that higher education will succeed in playing its considerable role in the modern industry. Quality improvement and relevance of higher education must be seen from its role and position in the society, its function in education, the result of its research and service, as well as its relation with work field in a broader sense. By taking those two into notice, it is definitely possible to realize the successful university concept as identified by Mithael Shattock as good teaching, good research, good academic support services, good study condition and a well managed academic an social environtmen [9].

Global Challenge
Principally, globalization is an economic engineering which has turned human life to become more transparent with human quality as its main core. The transparency has made English Language as an international language with a rising demand. The development of today's higher education is influenced by many factors, including the following external and internal factors:

a. External Factors
The following are some external factors which highly effects higher education:

Globalization
Globalization will turn into a cultural wave which highly reconstruct way of thinking, way of eating, way of dressing, and general life style of all mankind, especially young generation. This will inevitably lead to identity crisis. Modern industrial world will engender soulless global culture since the culture is not originally born out of real Indonesian identity. This is proven by what occurs in South Korea during the industrialization escalation process and development of the people's education [6].
Within modern industry this phenomenon is signified by technological advancement particularly in terms of communication, information, and transportation which entirely alters old paradigm with a new one as identified with the shift from "industrial economy" into "telenautica economy"; the shift from "capital and labor" based business into "knowledge" based business; the shift from "product oriented" into "service oriented"; the shift from "comparative advantage" into "competitive advantage"; the shift from "controlling" into "empowering", the shift from "centralization" into"decentralization"; and the shift from "hierarchical organization" into "team work" organization.
In order that a particular nation can take part in the new paradigm direction in sustaining the implementation of modern industrial society, the society itself is entitled to posses highly qualified relevance and competitiveness. Such capability is merely produced by competent education. For this purpose, the government clearly has a defining role in setting up some policies within the realm of national education system to overcome the challenge in the modern industrial society.
To triumph over the reigning globalization challenge, as is previously explained, at least there should be one education unit in every level of education to be developed into an international education unit, both by the central government and regional government (article 50, paragraph 3). Thus, it is necessary to establish an education legal entity to regulate all education managers and/or formal education unit, both those established by the government and the society, in the form of education legal entity (article 53, paragraph 1). What is meant by education legal entity here is a body which will provide services towards the students (article 53, paragraph 2).
This education legal entity as regulated by a special law (article 53, paragraph 4) must be principally non-profit oriented and able to manage fund independently to boost education unit (article 53, paragraph 3). With such education legal entity, the public fund and international aid can be absorbed and managed professionally and transparently with assured public accountability. Thus, the education legal entity will provide a strong legal basis towards education coordinator and/or international standard national education unit in the face of global competition.
With the advanced information technology, globalization has brought new paradigm into higher education realm in particular related to the management of education process. Nowadays, traditional higher education is transforming to become more comprehensive and multidiscipline. When such transformation takes place in a community, there will come out a new leader in many institutions. Entrepreneurship opportunity and motivation, as well as academic reputation and competent knowledge are some characteristics of university reformer coming out during the ongoing transformation.

National Economic Development
Early 2015 is the right momentum to project Indonesian economic condition in the future. As a country with recent political reformation, there are some sets of new policies which will affect its economic projection. Despite the sluggish economic trend, some economic experts estimate that in 2015 Indonesian economy will face a significant rise.
3. According to the previous economic evaluation in the last year, this year, Indonesian Bank estimates that Indonesian economic condition will gain defining progress with a higher economic development and balanced macroeconomic stability supported by the improving global economy and the strengthening structural reformation in reinforcing the foundation of national economy. Thus, university must carefully scrutinize and monitor national economic development in order to constantly foster its relevance.

Decentralization
Law no. 22/1999 on Regional Government and Law No. 25/1999 on The Balance between Central Finance and Regional Finance will significantly reform the regional government. Although Government Regulation No. 25/2000 clearly states that university is managed by the central government, unequal distribution of human resources between regions will totally determine the development of universities. After centrally controlled for some decades, the management capacity and regional planning to manage higher education is still milestone from satisfactory. Furthermore, this condition also shapes unfavorable political climate in the region to manage higher education creating an uncomplimentary tendency that the regional policy dealing with higher education development will undeniably be determined by local interests.

Politics
Despite the fact that some people may question government capacity to carry out structural reformation, the legitimate government retains enormous potentials to lead this country out of periode of austerity. To set a new direction or begin a new measurement such as introducing a novel paradigm in the university requires an effort to convince the strategic elite in the bureaucratic and legislative environment as well as the interest groups and the public about the significance of the new forthcoming era.

Socio-Cultural
A paradigm of novelty initiated by [10] is known as "Merton Paradigm" in the academic field comprising universalism, communalism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism. However, owing to the shift in the basic sciences into applied sciences or from the shifting concern on the benefit of science into the national economic activities nowadays, Merton paradigm is deemed as no longer applicable. There are some more norms added to the world of university namely specificity, practicality, and relevance [11]. Indonesian higher education strategic is supposed to adopt this concept as well, yet at the same time must stay away from an effort to merely imitate historically foreign culture for the realm of Indonesian university.

Technology
Today, Indonesian higher education has undergone technological development era with the most rapid speed ever in the history of mankind. For instance, the four year higher education cycle for undergraduate program is unbalanced with the swift technological adaptation taking place during the four year study. This is so due to the fact that technological cycle is much quicker than that of education. Industrial advancement also has shifted from a mass production which puts forth uniform standard skills towards a more flexible production demanding creativity, innovation, and team work. The model of uniform graduate training is more relevant with the industrial work atmosphere of flexible production since it posses plurality, decentralization, and institutional autonomy bearing creativity and innovation in university environment.

b. Internal Factors
Some contributing internal factors in shaping higher education are as follows:

Centralized Management Effect
Apart from the fact that there has been fruitful achievement in opening a wider access towards higher education, the measurement to foster a higher national education system has provoked some negative impacts. Gradually but sure, the occurring over centralization trend has overwhelmed the entire aspects of higher education management. Some initiatives directed towards higher education management in the past are halted underway because of there is no agreement reached about where the step should start. In many cases, the main stumbling block lies on the mutual distrust between the central authority and the university coordinators.

Management and Organization
University is embodied under the shield of the government through Research and Technology and Higher Education Ministry and that university subjects to regulations applied equally to all institutions. Such regulation begets some negative effects for the viability of university. Take for instance, the fact that lecturers performed moonlighting owing to internal incentive shortage, the inability of the university to provide extra incentive for the outstanding lecturers and researchers, lack of accountability and sustainability, and the predisposition to set unrealistic goals, and to make matter worse is the emergence of what is so called "project mentality".

Human Resources
Eventhough there have been several measurements to foster the quality of lecturers such as by widely opening some chances of scholarship for lecturers to pursue higher education level or provide training and education on know-how skills in the form of workshops, in general the quality of university lecturers in Indonesia is still far away from standard. Aside from that, the unfavorable academic atmosphere owing to incomplete facilities and infrastructure and underrated quality of administration staffs to meet the high demand of university administration makes the problem worse and even more complex.

University Research
There have been some attempts to fasten university research, nonetheless in reality it bumps with some stumbling blocks engendering unclear research goals. Aside from some external limitations, internally still there are many obstacles hampering this goal. Insufficient human resources and lack of supportive facilities and infrastructure are some of the troublesome hindrance during the implementation. Looking into some more details, it is possible to say that in Indonesia most of university researches are highly dependent on government fund. This is in contrast to the research fund provided by private sectors which account to very little in terms of number. Take for instance, the research activities carried out by post graduate students. There are diverse topics selected by each student in the research scope guided by the lecturers. The research network linked the university with other research institutions out of university scope is also very limited in numbers [12].

Higher Education Management
Brodjonegoro, et al., (2001) [7], defines the Framework of Long Term Higher Education Development as a long term development strategic planning aiming at positioning national higher education system with its limitation at the top notch position in the upcoming years in order to be able to face the forthcoming challenges ahead effectively. Although it is hard to render future projection, what can still be clearly seen is that science and technology will remain as the primary driving force of economy or even the development of the social life in most of countries worldwide. There will be a significant rise of innovation in the near future. Science and technology will definitely bear novel things which engender rapid development, either in the form of product, service, communication service, or economic procedures.
As a continuation of the Framework of Long Term Higher Education Development, National Education Department has launched "National Education Strategic Plan 2005-2009". The strategic plan of National Education Department clearly utilizes economic paradigm since it is relevant with its study using Organizing for Business Exelence [13] The principal of Organizing for Business Exelence is clearly stated in the activities of National Education Department today such as the implementation of National Examination. Indeed, economic paradigm is widely used in analyzing factors affecting education quality as that developed by National Education Department in which one of its application is the use of education production function.
The education production unction is considered to have great equality with the industrial production function which comes up with long history in the economic researches. Every single company within the realm of industrial world is ought to produce some products or services. To be able to do so, the company requires some inputs such as labor and capital which will be turned into product and capital in accordance to the existing technology. According to Shepard, to maximize profit, the company is expected to utilize the resources at its best and purchase some materials with the appropriate combination in accordance to its cost and productivity in producing products and services [14].
Those brief explanation merely indicates how enormous the forthcoming challenge of the day and in the future and how pivotal the role of higher education in creating academic personnel and professionals with high qualification to foster productivity and efficiency in the industrial production in order that Indonesian industrial world will have high competitiveness.
Higher education is highly appealing yet is complicated considering that to foster its development requires all stake holders, in particular the related university, to transform its management system from the centralized management to a more equally distributed power for decision making. Eventually, it is expected that such university system order will boost some more dynamic, intelligent, tactful, and effective system [15]

University Vision and Mission
It is presumable to consider that the vision and mission of Indonesian university is dull and limited to the eloquent formulation as written in the GBHN (Outline of State Policy). Upon receiving such question whether the vision and mission of Indonesian university nowadays has met the expectation, the answer will definitely disappointing. The actual vision and mission of Indonesian university is far away from what is expected.
Upon being observed, it is for sure that there will be an indication of the classic formulation of Tridharma (three services) of Higher Education namely education, research, and community service. Those three missions are totally out of the ark and are in need of renewed evaluation and some innovations. This is a must in order to make the university more prepared in answering the challenge of the new world which is fully transparent and democratic and is well supported with the development of science and technology. When such evaluation and innovation towards university vision and mission is neglected university atmosphere will become more obsolete with chronic disease of narrow-mindedness. Consequently, it may lose its moral responsibility. University is ought to become the seedbed of the intellectuals in Indonesia. Thus, when campus life suffers from development and moral responsibility blindness, the institution will be thrown out of the attempt to build future society that is the civilized society. Civilized society is the society with some eminent characteristics including fairness, prosperity, transparency, egalitarianism, and democracy.

The Development of Graduates' Independence
One of the sharp critics of the national education sector is that the system and education process pays less concern on shaping individuals with independent, creative, innovative, and democratic characteristics. The load of courses with so many credits in each semester has narrowed down the room for the students to develop their personality as an independent degree holder candidate to respond their social surrounding creatively.
In this case, the students merely have two primary targets in mind, namely: First, how to meet the stated credit semester target in order to complete their education and graduate as quickly as possible to be able to hold the academic title, and secondly, how to get a job as swift as possible with the academic title in hand. In other words, the main purpose of the students to go to college is to improve their "selling price" in the labor market.unluckily, most of the time, this attempt is less completed with the quality of leadership and entrepreneurship. Such kind of educational climate will give birth to scholars with "fashion items" orientation, instead of "becoming the role model". They put more emphasis on the orientation "to have" instead of "to be". In other words, they live with a passion to earn as much as possible without the creative drive to create and to serve for the sake of all mankind. The predisposition of universities towards democratization and decentralization in turn will invite the university coordinators to earnestly make the community college as a partner of the local government in order to develop the potential of the region, both in terms of economics, politics, and culture. Thus, the national curriculum should be reviewed, while providing local curriculum with a wider portion, in order to the bring the campus world closer to the opportunities and challenges of regional development respectively.

Mastery of Science and Technology
Research in many countries, both in developed countries and in newly industrialized countries in Asian region, suggests that sustainable economic growth is largely determined by the quality of human resources, capital accumulation, and the level of technology mastery. In the long term, it is hard to deny that the technology will become the main pillar of economic growth in a rapid pace, despite the fact that the ongoing economic crisis today has decelerated the industrial manufacturing sector and even triggered a relatively severest shock.
Industry will foster the social welfare and boost development and national independence sustainably in the era of globalization, when the industry is based on science and technology-. This is so owing to the fact that science and technology-based industries will be more dynamic, self-renewal, and will increase productivity as the main cornerstone of its competitiveness in the global market. In their self renewing process, the industry will always intensify their innovation and adaptation power towards any changes in the environment and that they will be in constant learning process.
On the basis of the foregoing notion, the government and the universities and other research institutions, together with the industry (business), has the potential to become a synergistic triangular to jointly handle the transfer of internalization, technology development and strategic role in improving productivity and national competitiveness in a sustainable manner. Thus, the research dimension as one of the three main dimensions of higher education (education, research, and community service) will naturally play more important roles in the global era.

University Autonomy
The common understanding of the principles of autonomy and academic freedom are: (1) Autonomy is the right or the authority granted by the authorities or by the government to a community environment, community or other official bodies to carry out their functions independently as long as it is not on the contrary to regulations generally accepted in society; (2) academic freedom is the freedom of the academicians in implementing their tasks and functional activities, namely education and scientific research as well as community service.
In Indonesia, the principle of autonomy of academic freedom is officially stated in Law No. 2/1989 and Government Regulation No. 30/1990 jo 57/1998 and applies to the entire higher education. A reference that can be pursued dealing with from which point university autonomy and academic freedom can be actualized in universities in Indonesia according to the following formulations: First, every university is entitled to direct all of the functional activities for the welfare of society and mankind as well as referring to the development of science and technology ; Second, in performing functional activities, universities can boost their performance when the working patterns are based on the principle of autonomy [16]