PhD students and early-career researchers in Indonesia are raising concerns about limited academic supervision and power imbalances within doctoral programmes, as the country prepares to expand its graduate population. Several students interviewed for Nature described meetings with supervisors as brief and largely administrative, focused on signing proposals or approving dissertations rather than providing sustained scientific guidance.
Rully Charitas Prahmana, a mathematics lecturer at Ahmad Dahlan University and visiting researcher at Western Michigan University, said informal interaction between supervisors and students was far more common in the United States than in Indonesia. In his experience, many Indonesian academics rarely meet students outside formal settings.
One of 11 interviewed PhD students said supervisors spent routine meetings discussing other lecturers instead of providing research guidance. Several interviewees requested anonymity because of concerns about their careers. Others reported being required to cover research-related costs themselves. One student said she paid for access to sampling sites at a total cost of about $1,700 annually, while Indonesia’s average monthly salary is around $200.
The concerns come as the government seeks to raise the number of doctoral graduates from approximately 75,000 to 125,000 by 2045. Higher-education, science and technology minister Brian Yuliarto says the plan is intended to turn the country’s young population into highly qualified human resources and support economic growth. Indonesia currently has an estimated 272 PhD holders per million people, compared with about 14,000 per million in the United States.
The Indonesia Endowment Fund for Education has allocated funding for 2,500 additional PhD scholarships this year, according to Yuliarto. Almost half are intended for study overseas, while the remainder will support students studying partly or fully in Indonesia.
However, Berry Juliandi, dean of mathematics and natural sciences at IPB University, argues that only some Indonesian universities have the capacity to provide adequate supervision on a much larger scale. He said the new funding was not accompanied by sufficient policies and regulations to improve academic supervision. Indonesia has 4,303 higher-education institutions, but the National Accreditation Agency for Higher Education classifies only 226 as highly qualified, based on factors including infrastructure, scientific reputation and lecturers’ teaching experience.
Conflicts between supervisors and doctoral students remain common even at stronger institutions, said Fikri Yanda, a PhD student in Thailand who runs an Instagram account discussing Indonesian academia. Indonesia’s education ministry has reported 874 cases of inappropriate behaviour so far this year, including ethical misconduct, violence, sexual harassment and abuse of power.
Andik Wijayanto, a biology PhD student at Gadjah Mada University, said such conduct can restrict academic freedom by discouraging students from challenging established views or making mistakes. He added that he had not experienced problems with his own supervisors.
Researchers also face pressure linked to publication requirements. After a 2017 review found that 3,800 of Indonesia’s 5,366 professors had not published in international journals regarded by the government as reputable, the country introduced stricter requirements for lecturers with postgraduate degrees to publish in high-quality Scopus-indexed journals.
The policy contributed to some academics turning to predatory journals, which charge publication fees without providing genuine peer review or adequate editorial support. Other researchers manipulated citation metrics to improve their scores in the government’s evaluation system. Regulations introduced in 2021 and updated in February require institutions to consider scientific integrity, including misconduct such as fabrication, plagiarism and forged authorship, when assessing lecturers’ performance and career prospects.
Sources: Nature.