Education is a successful key for everyone in the current world. It is believed that there are still many people in Indonesia, especially in Yogyakarta who do not have proper access and equality to education. The cost of education is a critical issue to all school system.However, World Bank (2007, p.6) reported that the distribution of students across of education in entire Indonesia, thus in this case including Yogyakarta, was only six percent during the 2004-2005 academic year.
In analyzing the equity and access to education, I think that equity needs to consider three factors: income-related, region-related, and socio-cultural. we need to take into account income-related equity that refers to the access of financially disadvantaged minority groups to various levels of education and their opportunities to succeed, even in higher education.That’s explained how many lower-income people do not see the benefit of sending their children to school after seeing the fact that many school or even university graduates cannot find any job and remain unemployed.
How about the employment? Based on income-related factor, there are so many people both university graduates and non-graduates cannot find any job easily. We have a very serious problem of employment as it has a large working-age population whose average educational level is relatively low. The problem is primarily manifested in the co-existence of the contradiction of the total volume of workforce supply and demand and the contradiction of employment structure, in the simultaneous appearance of increasing pressure on urban employment and acceleration of the shift of surplus rural laborers to non-agricultural sectors, and in the intertwining of the employment problem for new entrants to the workforce and that of the reemployment for laid-off workers.
In fact, since the higher education expenses are usually expensive, only people with good income may have the opportunity to go to higher education. This situation reveals the fact that access to education even in higher level is still difficult due to income-related problem.
We have to consider region-related equity that refers to the educational opportunities of the people living in disadvantaged areas throughout the place. The minorities included Javanese in Yogyakarta, except the Chinese, generally live in areas where economic development is growing slowly.
Beside that three factors, political condition often make getting an educatin imposible for many people. In short, political impact, make a basic education has been recognized as many right that always changed in different politic condition. As suggested by World Bank (2007), the government should allocate educational funds to provide the slow growing regions sufficient resources so that they can perform better in educational achievement. Educators should advice the policy makers to make equity and access to higher education a key policy goal with the important target group those people living in disadvantaged regions,and the poor.
