Monash defies COVID with new branch campus set to open

Indonesia’s Ministry of Education and Culture has granted the first licence to a foreign university, allowing Australia’s Monash University to set up a branch campus on the outskirts of Jakarta which will open next year.

The licence “allows us to forge ahead with designing a state-of-the-art, purpose-built campus in a burgeoning, modern and sustainable city centre” said Monash University’s Senior Pro Vice-Chancellor (Southeast Asia Partnerships) Andrew MacIntyre.

MacIntyre told University World News the new campus would be a research-intensive university, enrolling postgraduates in masters and PhD programmes, awarding Monash degrees and offering short courses and micro-credentials.

Monash has branch campuses in Suzhou, China, and in Malaysia but the programmes it will offer in Indonesia will be specific to that country, reflecting the needs outlined by the Indonesian government and will not overlap with courses offered by Monash’s other branch campuses, he said.

Courses opening for enrolment in October 2021 include data science, urban design, business innovation, public policy and management, and public health.

“We will expand this in 2022-23,” MacIntyre said. “These are multidisciplinary programmes that are about social impact in one way or another. We’re really aiming to contribute to Indonesia’s national drive to build human capital to help transform and help reposition the economy.”

Initially, some 200 students would be recruited across the four subject areas in the first year, rising to 2,000 masters students within 10 years, 100 PhD students and 100 taking part in short courses with 100 academic faculty, according to the university’s projections – this would be significantly smaller than Monash Malaysia with 8,000 students.

MacIntyre admitted to “big challenges to setting up, because we are the first foreign university in Indonesia”. He noted that planning to open a new campus while the COVID pandemic is still raging was another challenge, but it also presents an opportunity.

“COVID has traumatised global higher education markets, but it is shaking education markets around and people are looking at things that perhaps they would not have looked at five years ago,” he said, referring to students preferring to stay closer to home while the outlook for face-to-face classes abroad was uncertain.

“Of course, COVID produces uncertainty but it does not in the slightest shake our strategy. If anything, COVID for us further underscores the importance for the long term of this venture,” he said.

“Necessarily, we are preparing for all possibilities for our start up. We are preparing for a face-to-face start up and we’re also preparing for the possibility that the COVID context in Indonesia in the second half of next year might cause the [Indonesian] government to say campuses are closed. So we are preparing, if needs be, for an online start up,” he said.

“We have an advantage there because Monash has become very good at online and, if that’s the world we are going to be operating in in the second half of next year in Indonesia, we have got really good resources in the mothership to draw on to help us to do it really well,” he said, referring to Monash in Australia.

“We’re preparing for course delivery and academic working conditions to be either face to face, if we are able to, and if we’re not able to do them face to face because of COVID controls, then we will deliver them online and they will be delivered by the academics that we are recruiting for Indonesia, not just something we have off the shelf that is being beamed into Indonesia.”

Mainly catering for local students

Although initially recruiting Indonesian students, he said Monash Indonesia expected to have up to 20% of its student body from overseas after some years – a similar proportion to Monash’s branch campus in Malaysia. Similar to its other branch campuses in Malaysia and in Suzhou, China, it is targeting students looking for an English-language foreign qualification without having to go abroad,

Demand for foreign credentials is growing in the country. Currently Indonesia is sending a third more students to universities abroad compared to a decade ago, or almost 70,000 students going abroad at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels – the majority of them self-funded.

Currently, the most popular destinations for Indonesian students are Australia and Malaysia, and then the United States and United Kingdom. Singapore has been growing in popularity for postgraduate students.

The university would target “the more mature” postgraduate market who, perhaps for family or work reasons, possibly for price reasons, “do not want to go outside Indonesia. People who want a premium international education, are able to pay for it, but don’t want to leave home and would appreciate the price differential of not leaving home,” MacIntyre said.

The fee structure which is yet to be announced would be lower than Monash in Australia and Malaysia, he said, adding it would be “proportionate to purchasing power and cost of living” and would also reflect lower labour costs. There would be opportunities for scholarships and sponsorship of students, he said.

“We’re also designing our curriculum to be delivered in an intensive block mode,” MacIntyre said, pointing to attracting students who would wish to study part-time while working.

The Indonesian campus will have its own dedicated faculty. “This is not a fly-in fly-out model of delivery. We are recruiting people who want to come and build an academic career and be part of what’s going on in Indonesia at the moment. This is a country that is hungry for change and higher education has a big part to play in that.

“We think there will be people around the region and in Europe and North America who will be excited to spend part of their career building a new university in this context, and some of those people around the world will be Indonesian diaspora.”

The Indonesian government is also keen to reverse the brain drain and bring home more Indonesian PhD holders who studied abroad.

Other universities in Australia are looking closely at the Monash project before deciding whether to set up branch campuses in Indonesia, which is seen as a price sensitive market where students are constantly looking for value for money.