Equal at Seven, Unequal at Nineteen: How Provincial Dispersion in School Participation Widens with Age

Abstract

Indonesian provinces differ hardly at all in how many of their seven-to-twelve-year-olds attend school and enormously in how many of their nineteen-to-twenty-three-year-olds do. Using Central Statistics Agency school participation rates for 2025 across all thirty-eight provinces and four age groups, this article shows that dispersion widens monotonically with age on every measure. The coefficient of variation rises from 0.0428 at ages seven to twelve, to 0.0663 at thirteen to fifteen, 0.1151 at sixteen to eighteen and 0.2412 at nineteen to twenty-three, a 5.6-fold increase. The Gini coefficient rises from 0.0131 to 0.1268, a 9.7-fold increase, and the ratio of the highest provincial rate to the lowest from 1.24 to 4.38. The national rates fall over the same sequence from 99.23 to 96.30, 77.86 and 29.13 per cent, so participation and its equality decline together. Correlations between adjacent age groups weaken correspondingly, from 0.9607 between the two youngest to 0.7337 between the two oldest. The article argues that the Indonesian system has achieved near-universal primary participation with almost no provincial variation, that every subsequent stage reintroduces variation, and that a single participation statistic for a province therefore conveys very different information depending on which age it describes.