Complementary Policies to Increase Poor People’s Access to Higher Education: The Case of West Java, Indonesia

We see a weakness of the merit-based government scholarship program for students from poor families, Bidik Misi, as most of them fail to meet the minimum academic requirement. This paper provide a policy simulation that compares two programs, private tutoring voucher (PTV) and conditional cash transfer (CCT), to complement the Bidik Misi scholarship to boost the number of poor students to get the support. To this end, we offer a policy targeted for second and third year high school students at public schools. The data sources that we used in this study are the Indonesia Family Life Survey (IFLS), the Indonesia Social and Economic Survey (SUSENAS), and some primary data. To choose the best alternatives, we compare the cost effectiveness of both program and we find that the cost effectiveness per student in private tutoring voucher (PTV) is lower than conditional cash transfer program. The PTV program is also more convincing than CCT as PTV could directly influence the quality of instruction. We also check the robustness of the scenario using two one way sensitivity analyses. The sensitivity analyses support our finding that PTV program has more cost effective than the CCT.