Universities, the Job Market, and the Future of Civilisation
Every time a new study programme is opened, the public welcomes it as a sign of progress. Conversely, when a programme is closed due to low interest or perceived irrelevance to job market needs, society accepts it as reasonable. Higher education is ultimately understood primarily through one measure: whether its graduates quickly find employment.
It is at this point that the fundamental problem of Indonesian higher education is truly occurring. Universities are slowly moving from centres of knowledge development to institutions providing labour.
Campuses are evaluated not primarily from their ability to produce knowledge, but from their speed in supplying market needs. This kind of logic does indeed seem rational. Amid economic competition, high educated unemployment, and the pressure of living needs, education is considered to must immediately produce practical benefits.
Study programmes that promise jobs gain greater social legitimacy than fields of knowledge whose economic benefits are not immediately visible. Data on new student admissions clearly show this phenomenon.
In SNBP 2026, the number of registrants was 806,242 students, an increase from 776,515 in 2025. However, behind the high interest in entering universities, prospective students’ choices tend to concentrate on programmes perceived to have clearer job prospects.
In SNBP 2025, for example, thousands of programmes were available at 146 state universities, but public attention was more focused on fields considered to quickly lead graduates to the job market. Yet, this is precisely where the danger lies.
When universities are too subservient to the market, higher education loses its critical distance from the times. Campuses no longer lead the direction of social change, but merely follow the flow of constantly changing industrial needs.
Meanwhile, the history of civilisation shows that universities were never built solely to meet short-term work needs. Universities were born as spaces for the development of human intellect.
They preserve knowledge, nurture intellectual traditions, build public ethics, and produce new ways of understanding the world. From universities emerge ideas about democracy, human rights, modern science, technological revolutions, to critiques of power.
Many fields of knowledge that were initially considered abstract and impractical later changed the world. Pure mathematics, once seen as far from industrial needs, now forms the foundation of artificial intelligence and digital technology.
Philosophical studies, often deemed economically unproductive, actually form the basis of modern political ethics. Even humanities sciences remain an important bulwark for humanity amid increasingly mechanistic technological advances.
Therefore, when higher education is only measured by the employability of its graduates, we are actually oversimplifying the meaning of universities excessively. Higher education must not be disconnected from the social-economic realities of society.
Campuses cannot live in ivory towers while ignoring the real needs of the nation. However, universities must not be reduced to technical training institutions that are entirely subservient to market mechanisms.
The job market is temporary. Scientific knowledge has a longer horizon. This anxiety can be understood. BPS records the Open Unemployment Rate in February 2025 at 4.76 percent.
This figure becomes psychological pressure for families and prospective students in choosing study programmes. However, making today’s job market the sole basis for opening or closing programmes is actually risky.
The World Economic Forum predicts that 39 percent of workers’ core skills will change by 2030. This means that even programmes considered most promising today may face disruption in the coming years.
Industrial needs change quickly following technological developments, global politics, and world economic dynamics. Types of jobs that are promising today may disappear in a decade due to automation and artificial intelligence.
In such a situation, education that is too narrow and technical will quickly lose relevance. Conversely, education that is intellectually strong will be more adaptive to change.
Because what the future needs is not just workers with routine skills, but humans capable of critical thinking, relearning, reading change, and creating new solutions.
Preserving academic freedom
Universities must have moral and intellectual autonomy to develop knowledge, even when that knowledge does not yet have immediately visible market value.
Campuses must remain spaces for big questions about humanity, justice, technology, the environment, health, and the future of civilisation.
Without academic freedom, universities will only become extensions of bureaucracy and industry. Debates regarding the opening and closing of study programmes therefore need to be placed in a broader framework than mere administrative efficiency.
Opening new study programmes is not enough just to follow market trends and momentary enthusiasm for certain fields. Conversely, closing study programmes does not automatically mean the field of knowledge has lost relevance.
There are disciplines that remain strategically important, but fail to develop due to weak institutional support, poor programme quality, or the campus’s inability to transform following the times.
Problems in Indonesian higher education often lie not in the knowledge itself, but in institutional governance and adaptability. Therefore, the opening of new study programmes should be based on three fundamental things: scholarly legitimacy, social legitimacy, and quality legitimacy.
Study programmes must have an epistemological basis