PTN-BH Autonomy in Pierre Bourdieu's Perspective: Transformation of Capital and Habitus, Policies to Improve the Quality of Higher Education in Indonesia

Abstract

From an ontological perspective, the change in State Universities with Legal Entity status (PTN-BH) shows a move from being just government-run offices to separate legal bodies that have a lot of freedom in teaching, running the university, and managing money. However, this independence has caused a big gap between the ideal goals of policies and the real situation on the ground. This study seeks to examine the structural gap issue in PTN-BH by using Pierre Bourdieu's approach to sociology. This study uses a descriptive qualitative method based on Capital, Habitus, and Field theories to show that there is an imbalance where economic capital builds up more than cultural capital, like academic quality. Because of limited funding from the ministry, PTN-BH has to focus on practical solutions, which has led them to greatly increase the number of students they take in. Consequently, a crisis occurs in Field Capital (infrastructure) and Teaching Capital  (teacher ratio), which are disproportionate to the number of learning groups. The novelty of this research lies in identifying the contradiction between financial capital accumulation and the devaluation of spatial and pedagogical quality a contradiction rarely discussed in the managerial literature. The proposed solution is multisectoral capital synchronization, including strengthening political capital from local governments to ensure the sustainability of graduate competitiveness at the global level.