138 Mohamad Fahmi
evidence confirmed that the private Christian group has higher chance to
access higher education than public school group.
There are three determinants that are statistically significant to the
gap between public-private Christian. They are INCOME, FAMILY and
ABILITY. INCOME or earnings forgone contributes to the positive 0.042
difference to the gap. However this positive gap is compensated by the
dummy variables of province of the household lived and selectivity
variables gap.^4 The gap in ABILITY is –0.007 and significant at level 0.05 per
cent. The gap in ABILITY is mostly contributed by ZNEMSMA as it confirms
that the academic ability of private Christian is higher than public school
group. This result supports Bedi and Garg (2000) that considers private
Christian or Catholic school as the best school in Indonesia. The negative
gap on FAMILY and PARENTS also confirms that students from private
Christian school have higher SES status and their parents, particularly the
father, are more educated.
6. CONCLUSION
This chapter discusses the effect of school quality on higher education
participation in Indonesia. Using Fairlie’s (2005) non-linear decomposition
technique, I find that individuals who studied in public secondary schools
have higher probabilities to attend higher education than private non-
religious school and private Islamic school group. On the other hand,
private Christian schools are superior to public school in terms of higher
education participation.
The results of the higher education probability decomposition have
some implications. First, Indonesian public school students are likely
to attend higher education than students from private non-religious
and private Islamic schools. The probability of the public school group
attending higher education is 27.5 percentage points more than the private
non-religious school group, whereas it is 19.5 percentage points more
than the private Islamic school group. On the other hand, the negative
disparity between public schools and private Christian schools confirms
the superiority of private Christian schools with respect to higher education
access. The probability of private Christian schools students of attending
higher education is 8.8 per cent higher than the public school group.
The evidence also indicates that there are considerable differences
between public school, private non-religious school and Islamic school