Abstract:

Indonesia is an archipelago with diverse ethnics, cultures and basic educational advancement which create discrepancy in the sophomore year of university students. It is generally believed that people living in the eastern part of Indonesia lacks behind their counterparts from central and western part of Indonesia in the sense of access to information and the standard of basic education due to insufficient infra structure and geographical outreach. Fot this reason, the graduates of senior high school seldom to pass the national university entry exam and hence it becomes the chronic gap of human resource development in the eastern part of Indonesia.

Bearing in mind that such a development is essential to equalize weel being throughout the country, a program called higher education affirmative education has been implemented in the last four years that enables approximately 2000 senior high school graduates of eastern part of Indonesia have been admitted to enroll in the 40 selected universities throughout Indonesia on the basis of special criteria of selection. Those who are accepted receive a full scholarship covering the tuition fee and living allowance.

Nonetheless, only less than 5 % continue to proceed for under-graduate program (sarjana program) due to failure to meet the minimum GPA at the sophomore year. Most of them have been transferred to diploma program.

This paper discusses the prospect and challenges of the current program from the perspective of chronic causes of the failure and the likely solution offers.

Keywords:

Affirmative program, sophomore, Indonesia, university.