Universitas Terbuka Indonesia Open Policy 313facilitated access, and the Universitas Terbuka (UT) has made possible
easier access to higher education from the remote areas of the country. It
has been increased substantially in the last ten years as the government
committed to allocate twenty percent of state budget into education.
However, there are still issues relating to equity and quality that have to
be addressed, such as tuition, flexibility, resource availability, standard
and legal infrastructure. Equity issues continue to challenge policy
makers as they try to ease participation disparities between the rich, the
middle class and the poor as well between rural and urban populations
(Dhanarajan, 2014). Similarly, quality concerns also preoccupy both
central and local governments as education sector has been decentralised
to local government. The challenges of access, equity and quality in one
hand and the promising digital development in the future on the other
may reveal different higher educational landscape in particular the role
of open and flexible university in the near future. This article discusses
two consecutive impacts of UT Open Policy in addressing the long
concurrent issues of access, equity and quality in higher education: first,
democratization of higher education and secondly, eradicating the
knowledge divide.
18.3 Democratisation of Higher Education
Indonesia higher education access and quality have still been
challenging due to demographic and geographic constraints. Prior to
local autonomy policy in 2000s, higher education policy was extremely
centralized under central government. Currently higher education
policies are being restructured by providing greater roles of local
government to contribute on the development of local higher education
institution. In line with local autonomy, the progressive higher
educational policy has also been introduced by allocating more
authorities and roles of the local government. Within five-year period