Students urged to check postgraduate courses

JAKARTA (JP): Check before you enroll! That is the advice being sent out by the National University Accreditation Board to graduate school candidates planning to enlist in a program supposedly affiliated to a foreign university.

A postgraduate degree is often a ticket to promotion and advancement in careers, but the Board's chairman, Maruli Kamil Tadjudin, warned prospective students not to be bedazzled by the many advertisements offering programs supposedly affiliated with institutions abroad.

"People are easily deceived by these advertisements which offer an easy way to get a postgraduate degree," Tadjudin told The Jakarta Post on Tuesday.

He noted a glut of advertisements offering postgraduate programs enticing prospective candidates with a degree in less than 12 months.

Stopping short of describing many of these as possible fakes, Tadjudin urged extreme discretion and recommended candidates personally check the validity of these institutes with the Ministry of National Education.

He noted that often institutions fraudulently claimed to be associated with a fictitious university abroad.

"The ministry's office has a list of the official accreditation boards around the world so anyone can come and ask whether an institute is phony or not," Tadjudin, who was formerly rector of the University of Indonesia, said.

While candidates can personally check the list and greater transparency may be the key to avoiding such cons in the future, it seems that the ministry itself is reluctant to widely publicize the list of accredited educational institutions.

According to Tadjudin, such a list, which includes acknowledged accreditation boards around the world, did exist but for some reason or another the ministry had not openly circulated it.

He refused to speculate why the ministry remained reluctant to do so, despite already allowing people to individually check the institutions they wish to enroll.

Education, particularly postgraduate courses, remains big business.

The need for a higher decree has prompted many to offer degrees which may not necessarily be fake, but which have questionable academic validity.

The Ministry's Directorate General for Higher Education in the past has several times reported to police the existence of "fake" graduate courses. Unfortunately, none of these cases have been brought to court.

"We can only report the cases, we cannot arrested anyone," Tadjudin lamented. (04)