Thirty-One Points Between Primary and Upper Secondary: The Shape of the Indonesian Completion Gap

Abstract

Indonesian provinces lose an average of 30.93 percentage points of their cohort between primary and upper secondary completion, and the loss ranges from 9.26 points in DI Yogyakarta to 49.95 in Nusa Tenggara Timur. Using Central Statistics Agency completion rates for 2023 across the thirty-four provinces with data, this article shows that dispersion between provinces widens sharply with level while the level itself falls. The coefficient of variation rises from 0.0345 at primary to 0.0600 at lower secondary and 0.1600 at upper secondary, and the Gini coefficient from 0.0137 to 0.0294 and 0.0861. National completion falls from 97.83 to 90.44 and 66.79 per cent over the same three levels. Correlations between adjacent levels are high, at 0.8730 between primary and lower secondary and 0.8362 between lower and upper secondary, but fall to 0.6725 across the full span, so a province's primary completion accounts for 45.2 per cent of the variance in its upper secondary completion. Three of the five provinces with the widest gaps have upper secondary completion below 47 per cent while their primary completion exceeds 93 per cent. The article argues that the Indonesian attainment problem is located at a specific transition rather than distributed across the system, and that provincial rankings at primary level do not identify where it is worst.