Is more better?

In a world where happiness and well-being are much more than just an idea or a utopia, education, once seen as a "proven pathway to success" for young people, has struck a significant part of the population as a major decision in life and marked with many considerations including it's increasing opportunity cost. What used to be a great contributor to "reaching the dream" of life-long happiness and well-being ten years ago versus other factors like wages and employment in major cities around the world might look very different now, especially after the pandemic and the birth of "alternate" models to growing individual ability to contribute more to societies, economies, and overall development.

Nordic countries which include a few of the happiest countries in the world have had historically low-cost and free higher education, while on the other end of the spectrum, countries suffer from multifaceted challenges in climbing the life ladder, with education only a part of the pathway to happiness and well-being. In the 2023 World Happiness Report, happiness and well-being is a formula, rather than a destination. Imagine a ladder, where its steps are numbered 0 to 10, and the top of the ladder represents the best possible life, while the bottom represents what might be the worst possible life one can have. Gallup used this scale and came up with three distinct "categories" namely: thriving, struggling, and suffering, all of which represent factors like income level (per-capita GDP), health expenditures per capita, the Human Development Index, and citizen engagement, finding that in countries placed in the later suffering zone, correlation to poverty is significant.

Interestingly, China with its economic size, ranked quite low at 84th in the report, and while happiness is still a complex multifaceted concept involving neurophysiology, psychology, and economics perspectives, it is considered closely related to education, often portrayed as one of the key (direct or indirect) aims of education being able to transform individual's cognitive abilities, and the higher the level of education, the happier the individual according to many studies. If we ask any individual what being educated means for them, we most likely would get the answer that being educated increases control over work and life, alleviating psychological worries of having less control and therefore deprived of being able to actively try to achieve self-realization and independence, not to mention having more "power" over other factors such as health, income, and occupation. Education for many of us has a significant positive impact on happiness.

Educational attainment affects millennials' preferences including in choosing their spouses according to a 2017 research by Pew Research where millennials would choose counterparts with a similar or higher level of education, which is specifically higher with college-educated Millennial women. These better-educated groups are currently parents of Gen-Z, growing at 44% for today's 12-17 years with parents with at least a college degree - the youngest members of this Gen-Z group born between?2006?and?2012. This is significant because low educational attainment among mothers is linked to poor child health and academic outcomes. As such, the possibility that in the coming decade, these trends of educational attainment and generational transmission or mobility will keep on course sounds like a great forecast. In Indonesia, however recent research beckons us to revisit this assumption.

Scholars still see that Indonesia can serve as an excellent laboratory for exploring intergenerational mobility, with an education system often categorized as lacking in quality, but high in volume that is still not parallel to the country’s ambition to raise its international competitiveness (Rosser, 2018), Indonesia's diverse and complex ethnicity, regional archipelagic setting and other forms of communal differences, affect workforce creation and the challenge to prove that education is a prime determinant of long terms success of future workers.

A massive expansion program in Indonesia since the year 2000, has aimed to reduce the education differential among the various regions and provide an equal opportunity for education to everyone in Indonesia. Looking at the policy outcome of school expansion programs on intergenerational mobility in Indonesia, Hertz and Jayasundera (2007) documented that children with educated parents were the ones benefitting most from the policy. The more parents are educated, the better chance their children will also have the opportunity to be educated.

However, this was not always the case for the tertiary education. The study mentioned earlier showed that when tapping into more data and comparing wider generational data of IFLS (SUSENAS), this mobility declined at the lower end of fathers’ education distribution while increasing at the top end of the distribution. This finding poses significant economic and policy problems: at one end of the spectrum, higher-income families with longer educational attainment are attaining better possible lives (see earlier paragraph on Cantril Scale), while at the lower end, families with lower income, might not escape the income-education gap trap, which was also covered back in 2020 by Kompas, the national leading media, looking at how income growth of household income of lower educated families cannot play catch up to high tertiary education cost increase.

The question now is for Indonesia, how accessible is our education and is it available for middle and lower-income families, thus creating an incentive to propel the young generation looking for a better life through choosing to be in higher education, knowing that increasing the higher educational attainment might have great socioeconomic implications, create more possibilities for a better life, and ultimately a happy, engaged future population?

Economists often view education as an investment: individuals spend money to acquire skills and therefore signal "human capital", with the hope that investment will create greater lifetime returns, in the form of better income ultimately contributing to the labour market. This "black box" perspective is not one without flaws thereof viewing how individuals would enter, being upgraded with skills that increase one's productivity, as education or rather schooling is a sum of experiences and has multiple dimensions of impact on individuals' lives both getting in or outside of the labour market, for example, the right sets of schooling may not only impact incomes but also how someone views about work, how they enjoy said field, compared to not finding options for one's occupation.

On the other hand, education has proven that it can change how someone might make better decisions on many things including health, marriage, and parenting style. It can also drive adjustment to behaviours, seeing how it might drive the increase in grit, perseverance, self-purpose, and even being less likely to take on risky behaviours according to one study.

Being in higher education (or its absence), as early as its entrance, provides some important stages of transition in the life of young adults, exposing them to new environments, including the increase in stress levels, sense of responsibility, and peer-induced social disorders, which may not be prevalent in lower grades of education. Successful transition to adult life through higher education may have a strong association with better health behaviours, from lower cardiovascular risks to eating healthier food, closing gaps of health disparities, and also contributing to better well-being, regardless of original income level.

Of course, above all else (money included), higher education provides the opportunity for individuals to have more purpose, according to a study from Harvard, to the extent people might experience lives as being directed and motivated by valued life goals, says Eric S. Kim, Ph.D. An individual as the study shows, with a stronger sense of purpose, people may have a lower rate of death, ranging from cardiovascular disease to digestive conditions - again a factor in overall health, well-being, and therefore happiness. University life has much to offer from volunteering to empowering youth with a sense of social responsibility, which the author of Bank of the Poor, graciously mentioned in his book.

Unfortunately, in this last decade, although Indonesia's government has been working to expand access to higher education, enrolment of lower-income youth remains minimal with the majority of students in the country's best public universities mainly coming from the country's wealthier groups. One of the policies is to ensure at least 20% of university newly enrolled students are from the lower end of the socioeconomic group. Lacking implementation mechanisms, limited award allocations, and tight budgeting, the challenges to Equity and Access that are obstructing access for the poor might yet impede the country's vision to grow its human capital development and economy.

As such, today, more important than ever as the nation embarks on its next 20-year journey into 2045, celebrating its 100-year independence, a golden era of bonus demography, where youth's potential to drive the nation's strength as an economy and society might be at its peak, how the country sets its priorities in providing equal and equitable access to education would really be the door key to unlocking its true mark in the global economy and come to its next phase a much stronger one, ready for the challenges of its next century - and happier too.

#education #highereducation #indonesia #youth