 Good afternoon. I'm Ted Osius. I'm with CSAS and with the State Department. And it's a great honor to be here today to be able to introduce Putra Sampurna, a true friend to the United States, and a champion of US-Indonesia relations. Putra, for those of you who know him, you'll know that Putra Sampurna is the real deal. He takes action to implement his ideals. I visited two of the Sampurna academies. And these are amazing places. They're places where Indonesians with no means receive really top quality education. A lot of the students whom I met at these academies had never before slept in a bed before they came to these boarding schools. Their families, on average, earn less than $3 a day. They are highly motivated students with no sense of entitlement. Now, there are students who did not know English 3 and 1 half years ago who are earning 4.0 GPAs at US universities. This is a system that works. You'll meet a couple of these students a little later on. The Sampurna Foundation works on more than education, although I think education is very much the core of what this Sampurna Foundation does. But it also works on women's empowerment, on entrepreneurship, and disaster relief. We're focusing on education today, specifically because education is the number one goal of our comprehensive partnership with Indonesia. And the Putra Sampurna Foundation, to be honest, has sent more students to the United States than all our government programs. I urge you to read the white paper that's on the side table there. And I also urge you to pick up a copy of this book, also on the side table over there. It's by Walter McMahon. And I think Mr. Sampurna will touch on it. I want to point out that we are on the record today. We will be posted this session we posted on the web later on. We are live tweeting this event. And the hashtag is CSIS Live. And our handle is at Southeast Asia DC, S-E-A-S-I-A-D-C. And again, the materials that will be presented today will be on our website after this event. So it is a great pleasure to introduce my friend Putra Sampurna. Thank you. Thank you, Ted. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you, Ted and CSI, for having me here. The goal of this roundtable discussion is to advance new ideas to energize the US-Indonesia partnership. From a social perspective, I believe that we need not look any further than for the United States to demonstrate a definitive commitment to invest in Indonesia's education. Such action will convey the strongest message that the United States does care. And that you can act boldly with impactful and meaningful actions beyond the usual bold commitments to security initiatives and traditional development strategies. President Obama, whilst in Israel, said, peace will have to be made among peoples, not just governments. I agree. And accepting foreign students into our respective institutions of higher learning provides a vital link to creating the people-to-people ties that grow partnerships with countries around the world. There are many long-term studies that consistently show that increasing the numbers of bona fide bachelor degrees in developing countries has a faster, more emphatic, more measurable, and sustainable effect across a society than the traditional government interventions like direct welfare or even infrastructure projects. It is noteworthy to consider that the United States is the only country in the world that has the capacity to absorb so many into their universities. And yes, higher education diplomas are one of America's last world leadership commodities. Autos and steel are gone, but the 200,000 Chinese coming to the United States for a unique education quality product is a big endorsement. Some of you here, like the Chinese, must have read Dr. Walter McMahon's book, this book that you have copy of. Higher education greater good is the most authority to source to solidly prove through decades of longitudinal studies that more university degrees in developing nations result in less inequality, poverty, hunger, and malnutrition. And it accelerates social development providing for healthier families, fewer human rights violations, less risk of instability, lower crime, and a healthier environment. If this book was in the form of a newly discovered vaccine it would cure poverty. On the other hand, the record of military interventions building sustainable political or social stability or goodwill is somewhat less conclusive, to say the least. I have run some numbers on US aid and security programs. And you can see these calculations in a white paper that you have before you. Therein I offered a few provocative thoughts that will likely be considered outrageous propositions by the entrenched interest in security and aid divisions. I asked myself what could be achieved by repurposing 5% of US aid budget and 2.5% of the Department of Defense budget and diverting that fraction of their respective budgets to providing higher education for deserving students from developing countries in the United States. The result would have produced around 30,000 American-educated MBAs per year from USAID funding and another 250,000 American-educated MBAs per year from DOD funding. President Obama has also proclaimed the Asia rebalance with billions and billions of dollars to be spent to move personal assets from the Middle East to Asia. So I asked myself another question. What if the United States were to send one impoverished but gifted Asian student to university in the US for every soldier or sailor deployed in the region? Matching students to soldiers would undoubtedly be a monumental public relations coup for the United States, creating a tremendous goodwill and producing a lot of good citizens in the process. Imagine the possibilities provided by thousands of American-educated local scientists, scholars, public policy professionals, and business executives going back and contributing to the development of their own countries. Also consider what contributes in the empathy of so many American-educated individuals towards their US counterparts would bring towards efforts to achieve peaceful coexistence. It's about time the paradigm shifted in the US international strategies. Instead of gun to boat diplomacy, how about diplomacy? How about shifting from the world's policemen into the world's educator? If I'm not mistaken, the ratio between the annual costs of supporting university students to soldiers deployed overseas in non-combat areas is one to three. Social transformation through education is something that we at the Foundation are fully committed to with the development of future leaders as the main focus of our initiatives. One of our goals is to raise some of the brightest and poorest out of poverty and end to full participation in Indonesia's growth economy. Our challenge is to find innovative ways to drastically reduce the cost of providing an international benchmark education. The Sampoorn Academies. Our academies are rigorous Spartan boarding senior high schools three years for academically exceptional students carefully selected for the potential of becoming future leaders. For these students, we imbue character, honesty, hard work, and social commitment. The entire curriculum is taught in English and students graduate with the equivalent of an international baccalaureate accreditation. This means that upon graduation, these kids would qualify to enter any English-speaking university in the world. The Sampoorn University is our own recently licensed university. The curriculum is also taught in English and it provides for an internationally benchmark four-year degree program. In a unique collaboration with the Lone Star College System, Texas, our university now offers an American-Indonesian mobility study program that allows its freshmen and sophomores, like the Lone Star peers, to earn an all-American associate degree after the first two years at the university. This affords them to transfer their earned credits seamless into over 100 US universities. The umbrella organization for our institutions of learning is the student's own cooperative. So throughout the learning journey of our students, financial assistance packages are organized and provided by the cooperative, a student-owned but professionally managed cooperative that also provides career development and mentoring services. Additionally, the cooperative provides a network of support systems for our poor and socially isolated students that is similar to the kind of social and professional networking available to most middle class US students through the social clubs, fraternity memberships, university affinity groups, professional and trade associations, and the traditional alumni associations. The poor, even those with advanced degrees, don't typically have these connections. So we are building one for them. Before I go on, I must tell you that our foundation has been entrusted with a loan guarantee from the USAID department, Development Credit Authority, for $5 million, and that money is doing some of the work of sending students, like our two students here, to the US. We consider the trust of the US government to be an emblem of our fiduciary liability. In addition to our initiatives of leadership development, our university school of education has also developed a three-year outreach program which provides for improving the quality of state-owned Indonesian high schools through the professional development of their teachers, their school leadership and management programs, and their school government's programs. The university delivers these services through a conference of whole school development approach and the required funding per school running in the range of $350,000 to $500,000 over a three-year period. Our clients are basically large corporates and NGOs who want to make a meaningful impact in their areas of operations or nationally. A case in point is our high school in Bali, which we took under our wing. Before it entered the SDO program, it was academically ranked 41st in the nation with around half of their students failing the national exams. Just three years later it was ranked number nine in the nation with 100% exam passing rate. Since then it has continued to improve on its own and is today ranked sixth in the nation. But more telling than all of this is the fact that the student body now includes kids from well-to-do families. Over the last six years we have successfully serviced 40 large corporations with 52 programs in 118 schools and nine madrasas affecting some 57,000 teachers. Also over the last few years the SDO programs has modularized its product offering and is now able to service much smaller contracts on a specific needs basis. Based on the SDO successes the foundation in October of last year took the lead role in establishing the national movement for education for the purpose of assisting state schools in improving their teaching learning capacities. This movement represents a public-private partnership among the Ministry of Education, the Regencies, our foundation providing the software and NGOs providing hardware resources and the CSR programs of companies with local operations providing some or all of the required funding. National and local government schools, corporate sponsors, a win-win-win situation with the foundation as being the catalyst. I'm happy to report that since its launching last October the movement has gained considerable traction and is now looking at a demand for service across 12 provinces, 141 Regencies and over 700 schools operating within those Regencies. And this is putting a tremendous strain on our resources. At this point I'm happy to announce that we have with us today Chancellor Richard Carpenter of the Lone Star College System of Texas. He's a partner and a friend and a courageous leader in higher education. Lone Star College is the largest institution of higher education in the Houston area and the fastest growing community college system in the nation with 78,000 students currently enrolled in academic courses. Lone Star College is also the winner of the National 2013 Simon Award for Comprehensive Internalization by any university or college. But before I officially introduce Dr. Carpenter, let me tell you why I'm so excited about our combined aims program. First and foremost, it is an American-Indonesian initiative established by two individuals from the opposite sides of the Pacific Ocean who forged the partnership primarily on the belief that it is in the long-term interest of both their countries that it happens. It provides a wonderful setting for President Obama to refer back to the spirit of the Comprehensive Partnership Agreement signed by both our presidents when last he visited Indonesia. Around the world, there are many branch campuses of major league universities. These are elite and expensive. Our aims program is the first that opens up a pathway to achieving a U.S. higher education by average Indonesians. At around $10,000 border tuition per year at our university, we can drastically reduce the in-state or out-of-state cost of obtaining a four-year bachelor's degree from a ranked U.S. university. I'm also very confident that deserving students who finished their first two years of the aims program with a GPA greater than, say, 3.25 would easily be able to find corporate sponsors or academic scholarships for them to continue onto their bachelor or master degrees on a bonded basis in the United States. Our university with its aims program in place will provide a venue for reducing the over-cost of a diploma diplomacy should such a policy in whatever form be adopted. Finally, one of the goals of the Comprehensive Partnership Agreement is to double the number of American students studying in Indonesia from 200 to 400 within the next five years. Imagine that it takes just $2 million per year in grants or student loans to immediately accomplish these goals and at no loss of earned credits as these students return to their respective state universities to finish off their education. So now without further ado, let me introduce to you Dr. Carpenter and invite him to say a few words. Good afternoon, everyone. As you can see, Pak Putra is a remarkable man. He's quite a visionary. I've had the privilege of working with him for several months now and one of the things that I admire most is that everyone in the room knows they're talkers and they're doers. This man matches his words with resources and action and that's the reason the partnership that we developed was made possible because we had someone who did more than talk about it. We had someone committed to doing it. The AIMS program that you've heard referred to again, I remind you that's American, Indonesian, Mobility Study Program is all about access. All about access to higher education and economic prosperity for the many, providing affordable opportunity and rapidly expanding the middle class and Indonesia. What we're talking about here is providing the mechanism for developing the future leaders for Indonesian globalization. What we are creating and will launch in September is no less than a global entry, global exit model for higher education, very unique, with worldwide applicability. Now I have a very personal reason to be passionate about what we're doing. I too, like Ted mentioned, have been to the San Pono Academies. I have met impoverished students from rural Indonesia whose futures were bleak. I have seen these students progress to enroll at the Lone Star College System. And I have watched, hear this, every one of them earned 4.0 grade point averages, every one of them. Now I relate personally to these students. You see I grew up in rural Louisiana and as a foster kid I had three sets of parents. One of them finished high school, none of them went to college and the trajectory of my own life was forever altered by access to a community college, affordable access to higher education. Who could have looked at me as a kid and seen a CEO of a college system enrolling 78,000 students and employing almost 8,000 faculty and staff. Now look at the opportunities that we are extending to rural Indonesians and imagine. Just imagine the impact that we will have on the future of that country. Look into their eyes today and you can see the future of a nation. As already has been mentioned, Lone Star is the fastest growing community college in the US. We attract students from 108 countries. We are an open door institution, proudly admitting students of all backgrounds to reach their dream, just as Pak Petra provides to his Indonesian students. And listen to this. Every year, we transfer students to institutions like Harvard, Columbia, Duke, USC and almost every land-grant university in the United States. Now, the San Bernard academies, we've got nine of their students this year at Lone Star and as I mentioned, they're all making 4.0 grade point averages but there's more to it. The definition of a partnership indeed is about mutual benefit, isn't it? As we provide affordable access to these students, they in turn raise the bar in our American classrooms. They are motivated. Faculty love them. Rarely a day goes by that I'm not getting an email from one of our faculty saying, please send us more of those, we love them. Now let's explore together how we can progress in talking about our comprehensive partnership with Indonesia to actualizing it. As Pak Petra said earlier, let's demonstrate the audacity to link action to our words. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Carpenter. We're joined today by Timmy and Anga, future leaders of Indonesia. Both are from rural East Java. Anga is Muslim, Timmy is Christian. I urge you to meet with him after our Q and A session. The academies really are serious about teaching the future leaders of Indonesia. Like all of Dr. Carpenter's nine Indonesian students, both Timmy and Anga are earning 4.0 GPAs at Texas Tech. And I just wanted to point out that Anga didn't speak English three and a half years ago. It's an extraordinary proof of concept. So it's great to have you both here today. Thank you for coming. We're gonna open it up to Q and A in just a moment. I would ask that when you ask your question, if you identify yourself and use the microphone, if it's anywhere nearby, so that our folks who watch on the internet can also hear. I'm gonna take the prerogative as the convener to ask the first question, if I may. We've just heard about, Mr. Semperon, we've just heard about three successful models. And I would point out that they're interlocking models, Ames, American Indonesian Mobility Study, Schools Development Outreach, and the Development Credit Authority. Any of these three models could be scaled up. Which would you prioritize? Which would be your top priority for scaling up at this stage? To me, the top priority is still the leadership development, okay? I mean, that's what's gonna make, that's what's going to change the country. So to me, the Ames program would be the most beneficial to the country. And bilateral relations between the two countries, I think. Thank you. And we're now open for questions from anybody. Again, if you would identify yourselves, please, Adam. Yeah, Adam, the Ames program is in Indonesia. So it's bringing American know-how, okay? And bringing the first two years, the freshman and sophomore years in college, to Indonesia. So overall, it becomes a lot cheaper. I did some calculations. And for an American student themselves, going spending the first two years in Indonesia, and then going back to their home state like Texas A&M or whatever, it will reduce their cost of a bachelor's degree by 30%. Okay, and you get to learn culture too at the same time. So yeah, you're absolutely right. For us at the foundation to send our enrollment in the academy, unfortunately, it's only 200 per year. But for me to send 200 students a year to US colleges from day one is not possible. Okay, so you're talking about, if you're talking about six years at 200, you're talking about a student body of 1,500 people, kids at 35,000 a year is not, for me it's not personally possible. Ambassador? That actually takes to a question. How much, what is your general view on the question of distance learning and the use of the internet to not, is a substitute for teacher-student interaction but is a supplement to it? Have you been able to take advantage of that to date or do you anticipate it being useful in the future? Dr. Carpenter has been, and I have spent a lot of time talking and debating this issue. And you know, internet education is not as simple as people think it is. I mean even for the kids. Okay, they really have to discipline themselves in getting through it. And we believe, correct me if I'm wrong, Dr. Carpenter, but you need to have a hybrid. Okay, where you need to have at least a face-to-face with the students at least three, four times a year. Okay, or somewhere where they can go and sit there and ask questions on what they're learning on the internet. So it's kind of a hybrid system. And in our university program in Indonesia, we will be introducing some of that. And where we as an organization, Indonesian organization can put across a archipelago, university offices if you will, where kids can actually go if they have a problem with what they learn on the internet. But without that, yeah, we hear a lot about online, online learning and all that, distance learning. But I really have my reservations as to whether it can be done totally offline without some kind of interaction with me. And I think in Houston itself, okay, I think Dr. Carpenter, the Lone Star College system insists that at least there's twice a semester that they have them on hybrid. So it is a hybrid system. We have about, at Lone Star in Houston, we have about 30,000 online students from all over the world. Remember though, what we're doing in Indonesia is we're reaching a very broad spectrum of the population. And what we found at Lone Star in our own work is that there are those for whom pure online education works. There are those for whom that works. There are those for whom it won't work. And what we wanna do is we wanna make sure that as we launch this program that we're doing a little bit more hand-holding. One of the unique things about it, as everyone knows about a community college, is that we really are nurturing environments for students. So it's not just a student who could go anywhere, but it's a student who couldn't go anywhere else that we're interested in serving. And typically that student at best, fares better in a hybrid setting and more mature students fare better, will typically do better than those students in an online setting. We do have a very robust online offering, and we try to address the needs of the student as they vary. It sounds as though you're talking about online in the form of kind of pure online where you take a course and then hybrid sounds like it means a few times a year you come into the classroom. What about a hybrid where the online is actually taught by a teacher in the classroom, but it raises the quality of, I mean, I would think, for example, for an Indonesian teacher teaching international finance, having a good online resource available would raise the quality of what he or she could teach. Is that of interest or not? All of these approaches are of interest. For instance, we're also discussing now how do you sit down and provide schools in the remote areas like plantations or forests, okay, where you have like the little house in the prairie, you have one in one school, you've got kids of five years old all the way to 16. And yeah, in those cases, we're working with Wilmar, and we're developing the courses where we send teachers from that area that Wilmar or the company pays for, and then send them back and like what you say, teach off the courses that we send, where they don't have internet connection, we will send them the DVDs, okay, and I'm sure there are a lot of specialty courses, okay, that can be been from the US if you will, okay, but I think right now to be practical, I think we need to sit there and get going, if you will, and that's gonna be face-to-face type of education. Let me further follow up on your question, I could, one of the things that we are also doing is everyone probably has read about flipped classes and we're seeing mixed results with that depending on the nature of the class, actually depending on the nature of the discipline in some cases, where the student studies online, then comes to the classroom with a faculty member to apply and discuss what they've studied online so that the actual, so almost the classroom, typical classroom environment occurs online, but then they come together as a group to either apply that knowledge or to discuss or to have exercises around that, that we haven't, we're just launching our program here, but we envision that over time these are the kinds of things that we'll be introducing into that program as well. But I think the strength of the Lone Star System, you know, when I first met with Dr. Carpenter and you talk about 78,000 academic enrollment and you talk about another 30,000 online and my head goes click, click, click, click, click, click, I can use all of this, okay, without trying to reinvent the wheel. And that's where I'm really very excited about the partnership we have because all of these things that you're talking about, you know, Paul is doable and over the long-term period, but they got to know how and we can build the infrastructure throughout the archipelago. Okay, and that's where, that's what's gonna take to make it work. Investor Merrill. David Merrill, President of US Indonesia Society, Yusindo, and most of you know me and you all know that Yusindo supports strongly through itself and through the Joint Council on Education Partnership, the goal and of how to increase the number of Indonesians going to the United States and the other way around. And so we're looking for and applaud innovative models such as the one that's being presented today. It's not easy to figure out how to do this. And we've all found that the goals in the Comprehensive Partnership Document of Doubling, though it was achieved 10 years ago or in 1987, it's harder to achieve than anybody really thought. So any model that works is one to be encouraged and applauded and I do that to this one. We've publicized that. Now, particularly within that, the two years in an associate degree, followed by two years for a full BA is one that we think has great promise. And for one thing, it cuts the cost so drastically as Mr. Simperna pointed out. And the other, at least in some models, at least those that involve community colleges in the United States, some of the admission requirements, some of the testing requirements are not required as much or at all. So it's an easier pathways, both cost-wise and admissions-wise. This particular one is, I'm not sure if it's unique. I think it is probably unique and I wanna understand it better. So there's two years in an associate degree in Indonesia and then that is credited in the United States. Now, what I'm not clear on is this aimed more at, or maybe it's both, American students going there, which has been mentioned, or Indonesian students preparing there and taking their two years? What's the balance? What's the strategy? I don't differentiate between Indonesian students or American students studying at our university. I mean, that's the beauty of this thing. I see. So after two years, you're gonna get two associate degrees for all practical purposes. One is from our university and the other one's from Lone Star College. Okay, you can use whichever, you can use the Lone Star Associate Degree, which I call the All-American Associate Degree, and use that to transfer all your credits that you've earned over the two years through Texas A&M, Yale, Harvard, or any of the 100 universities, over 100 universities in the US that accept Lone Star's credits. Well, you haven't been able to send me any American students. I just challenged you before this meeting. Yeah, you know. Yeah, I mean, but look at the possibilities. At $10,000 a year for the first two years, that's 20,000 bucks, okay? At 35,000, out-of-state rates of per year, there's another 70,000, that's 90,000, as opposed to 140,000. So it's a, yeah, even for American students. So you should be sending me 200 or more. Okay, but I mean, that's the whole purpose of exchange programs, okay? So you've got American students studying, you know, joking aside. But in this case, what excites me is that you don't have to learn about Kamalan or Indonesian puppetry. You know, you can learn whatever you have to in mathematicals and technical stuff. Cultural exchange is just as important. So you spend two years over there, you learn Indonesian culture, you learn how you got Indonesian friends. And then you can, after two years, you go back to Texas A&M and you haven't lost one iota of your credits. And that's what excites, that's what makes it exciting. So it's not only cost-saving for us, okay? If you sit there and say you want to sit there and educate Pakistani students, you can send them to us in Indonesia and it saves you money, okay? So unless you sit there and replicate this program, you know, across Barbara Harvey. Barbara Harvey, a retired Foreign Service Officer. I wanted to ask where you get the faculty for your academies and what is the relationship between the faculty of the state universities in Indonesia? You know, in our university, we have a school of education. And so our teachers are trained ourselves and higher paid than other teachers. And in comparison, in comparing teachers from state universities, far cry or big difference, okay? And basically in the pay and the quality of the teachers. And like I say, if you look at our SDO program, okay, why were we able to improve the quality of schools so by so much? It's basically we retrain all the teachers that they have. Okay, and we actually go to the schools and sit there and say, you know, these teachers aren't gonna make the grade so far. And if they don't get fired, we just leave the school. We just abandon the program because it's not worth our time. You know, it doesn't matter what you pay me. Like I can't do the job. If we cannot get the principal to buy it, nothing's gonna happen. Okay, so you're talking about state schools where the regencies have to pay. And yeah, if you pay it, fine. But we're not just out to make the money. We have to sit there and show that we can improve the school. So it's a change in the curriculum or change in how it's taught. Training the teachers in new methods of teaching. And basically teaching them how to govern the school better, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Including PTAs or getting parents involved. And that to me is a big, big, big, big plus. A second part of your question though, I think. I heard from the university in Indonesia, those faculty are recruited from around the world. Truly world-class faculty. And so what we're doing as a partner, remember we're providing the first two years essentially a four-year degree program there. We are using a combination, dominated by faculty who are at the university, but also augmented by full-time faculty that we will rotate in and out from Lone Star, Texas. We are, because we're in Texas, Southern Association accreditation is very dear to us. And it's the value of our program in Indonesia, that accreditation. So we are required under that accreditation to have lead faculty on site there. So it's not a remote where we're just somewhere over here saying that we're doing this. This is a very active partnership where our faculty are intermingling from day one. And the beauty for us is that it gives us an opportunity. We've got a long waiting list of faculty who are saying, me, me, yeah, I wanna go, I wanna go. So they'll go in and they'll teach a semester or a year and rotate out and others will come back in. And so they'll work in partnership with the university faculty there. Thank you. My name is Dr. Prakash and I am the founder of Bridging Nations on the sixth floor here. And I am in the process of setting up a university between here and India. And it is going to be quite a different model. And I want to ask you, in my research, ran into a couple of different very important discoveries. How much of employers are involved in curriculum development? Because what I find in most of our higher education, I came to this country only for higher education, you know. And hardly there is any attention paid or to a very small extent. The curriculum has any influence on the corporations. Because ultimately I think the customer of the institution is employer and not the student. Student we think is like a product. So we really have to make sure they are well qualified. And I'm experimenting with blended learning. And like two days, two hours a week is asynchronous. And only one hour a week is asynchronous for a three credit course. So I would like to ask Indonesia, how much influence does the employers have in curriculum development? And what is the employability of the graduates when they come out of school? And what are the actual numbers? Like in India, those are very poor numbers. Like some statistics have only 20% are employable. So there is a big mismatch between the universities and the corporate world or let's say the employees. I would like to get some idea of how you do it there. I'm not an accommodation, but if you look at our kids, I don't have the same problem. You know, I'm not government. So I don't have to educate everybody. I can educate the best. So the output of my university, I believe, will always be employable because they are the best. So we take in the top 5% academically from middle schools, and then we sit there and put them through a very rigorous culling process, if you will, for only those kids that show leadership potential. So if I only take in 200 or if I hope to take in 1,000 a year, I mean, that is a very small number of graduates. Now we're also working with, if you look at our paper, we're also working at the cooperative. It also has clients, if you will, or partners, like Exxon and all these large corporations, Citibank and all. And we try to sit there and provide them with internships within these corporations. So if you sit there and look at it from that standpoint, that's why I'm saying in the AIMS program, if you sit there and have the first two years and you have a GPA of greater than three, I'm sure a lot of my kids, on a bonded basis, I can get corporates to sit there and sponsor their school. So I'm not trying to shirk the question, but for us it's a different set of problems. I don't have to solve the country's education, that's for my minister of education to solve. Okay, I can only do my part to sit there and create a higher level of leaders of good moral fiber that can. Let me give you something. You know, when Ambassador Marshall went to one of my academies, okay, and then he had leaves, I had a press conference. And chicly one of the lady journalists at the end of the, and but what are you doing all of this? And I said, well, have you seen my kids? He said, yes. I said, what do you think of them? I said, they're top notch, right? He said, yes. I said, well, imagine this. I got 250 kids out there. I say, our parliament is made up of 500 individuals. Now imagine if our parliament was made up of 250 of my kids. Nothing to say. It's obvious. Again, I'm not trying to skirt the question, but you're talking about it from a national perspective. Exactly, exactly. Well, overall, we're in dire straits and that's why it's not solvable here. But I'm saying, we in Indonesia are short 700,000 university seats. So we cannot even take graduates from high school. Okay, now state universities, the tuition other than the other fees here and fees there. Okay, it's 2,500 to 3,500 a year. To me, it's garbage in, garbage out. What kind of education can you provide for 3,000 bucks a year? So we have serious problems. I mean, so, if you don't have a U.S. degree, what job are you gonna get? Your job as a graduate out of an Indonesian university is 300 bucks a month. Okay, I pay my teachers more than that. Okay, I believe teachers should be paid at MBA rates. Okay, because that to me is the value of a teacher. Okay, but like I say, I don't have the nation's burden or problem on my shoulders. I can just do what I can do to take care of that small percentage and that's the program that we're after. Hey, bring it on. So to touch a little bit on the doctor's point that I was just talking, I know you don't wanna give statistics of how your graduate's good job, but is there a certain curriculum that you're driving them for? Or are you doing self-select? I mean, are you pushing me one word a split? Our ratio is imbalanced. Too many girls. 55% girls, wrong. We gotta change that. No, joking aside. When we first came out with scholarships before we ran our schools, we noticed that the graduates out of the local universities that we gave scholarships to could not get jobs. Okay, so we did a whole assessment of why that was. Okay, and if you look at our programs today, they're very tailored to what we care more about where are you going to be after you graduate? Okay, so right now it's like in engineering, okay, business. Okay, we don't do gamelan or drama classes. And the next step for us, and we do IT, media and IT. And the next step, those are the main three disciplines that we are at. The next one will be engineering and the one after that will be plantation agriculture. Okay, so all of these are the big demand jobs. Yes, sir. Pakputra, I actually just answered my question. I was wondering if you were trying to stream kids into certain specialties. But that's one question and I think you at least partially answered that. The other question I was gonna ask you is where Indonesia as everybody knows is a very far-flung place and some very remote places. How do you go about finding the top 5% that you mentioned? Once our program was known, okay, all teachers want their kids that are brightened and they will be pushed off. Let me give you an example. Last year, okay, 8,000 applicants out of the top 5%. Out of the 8,000, 3,000 would have made our qualifications and leadership because we sit there and interview them one-on-one, et cetera. We put them in groups and you see where the alphas come from, et cetera. Okay, so 3,000 out of 8,000. So 8,000 were in the top 5%. 3,000 we could have accepted. We only have funding for 250, okay? So what a waste of intellectual capacity. Next is Angela and then Mike. Angela Dickey, Foreign Service Officer assigned to the U.S. Institute of Peace. If I'm not mistaken, Lone Star also accepts quite a few Vietnamese students. My experience with working in Vietnam showed that the program you're describing works very well for the Vietnamese students. I haven't lived in Indonesia, I still hope to, but in Vietnam, Vietnam has successfully become, I think, like the number eighth or ninth national sender of students to U.S. universities and a lot of those students are going to community colleges. But it's working less well when the colleges try to set up a program in Vietnam because there's no academic freedom in Vietnam and you can only teach certain subjects there like computer engineering and so forth, no humanities, no liberal arts. So my question would be, and I gather since Indonesia is now a democracy, there's no such issue for you and your accreditation is safe and you're fully satisfied on that count. Well, first we are operating in Vietnam. Have been now for about three years. The challenges are considerably greater for the reasons that you articulated and there are limits to what we can do there. We could never create a program like this there and when I say we're operating there, not as a degree granting institution like we will be doing Indonesia, but as a course specific, ESOL, very limited and that's more on the Vietnamese side than ours. We were quite willing to do more but it sounds like you know the challenges are there. We have found nothing like that in Indonesia. What we found in Indonesia is open arms, a can do attitude, lots more flexibility, lots more freedom. That's why we're actually moving to have a full blown accredited campus presence there. We could not do that in Vietnam. Mike Anderson. Next and then next. Thank you. Could you talk a bit about the regulatory environment in which you have to operate as a private sector university, issues like authority to grant degrees, work permits, taxes, repatriation of profits and also what reaction are you getting from the ministry which historically has been fairly tightly controlling over higher education in Indonesia? You gotta go back. That's changed. Before medical and education was the purview of non-profit organizations in Indonesia. And yeah, at the beginning there were challenges and why can we not do this? Well because the rule says that you got, and so going through the process it was a challenge but we got all the licensing that we need and the minister is very happy. We're the only new university license granted in the last three, four years. Because the ministry is looking at it and saying we got too many universities. Run by whatever, whatever. And so we want to consolidate them into fewer universities, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so our choice is where do we buy an existing university and try to change it or do we go to the ministry and say there's a different case? Okay, so look at who our partners are, look at the programs that we're trying to do, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera and we got the full backing of the ministry on that. Okay, so we just got our license and we're off and running. Joe Rothstein from EIN News. Your materials argue for a diversion of money from DOD and aid to education and I'm wondering what you're doing to try to accomplish that and if I sense a bit of frustration here in your materials, how's it going? Sorry. It's a redirection, reallocation of, okay. If you sit there and look at all the programs, it's not really a frustration, but I don't see the US getting enough credit, PR credit. There's no PR win in anything that you do. Neither the World Bank, by the way. So it's why are we spending those tax dollars on doing things, okay? And I'm saying, you know, the State Department and I'm not American and the Department of Defense should just take one motto, okay, in America cares, okay? Whether you do a USAID or whether you sit there and do troops or whatever, I mean, you know, the whole theme should be America cares. I mean, that's where you're gonna win the hearts and minds. Okay, but I, you know, I question, to me, USAID is under the whims and fancies of Congress and its constituents. So you've got programs all over the place without having any focus on getting anything done right. The DOD, in my opinion, is very focused in what they do. They only have one thing that they want to accomplish and that's to win, okay? So my proposition here is why don't we do a study and I'm more than willing to sit there and subscribe to this funding of doing that study of, you know, what is the value of the United States bringing in one kid from an impoverished region whether it's from Yemen or Jordan or Iran even, okay? Of teaching them and educating them in the States. I mean, I was educated in the States and I might have philosophical differences with you but at least I understand where you're coming from. You understand where I'm coming from. We speak the same damn language and we can come to some compromise on a lot of things. So if you sit there and say, you know, the other thing from an economic standpoint, you know, after Sukarno fell, okay, the only country that we Indonesians could go to without a visa was Germany. And by the way, we could get a tertiary education in Germany at the same cost as a German citizen, which means zero, you just pay your living expenses. Okay, so now I come back and I'm running a company and I have all my engineers coming from Germany, okay? And every time there's a requisition for equipment or anything, it's always German equipment, okay? And that's where I'm sitting there and saying, you know, there is value of bringing and, you know, I really would like to know the result of a study, say what's the value of one foreign student in America as compared to one soldier you're gonna put in Germany or Okinawa, okay? But the cost is three to one. So if you sit there and say, if you reduce all your overseas forces by 25% and apply all that money that you're spending on those 25%, you will have a one-to-one ratio of foreign students to soldiers overseas. Okay, now, which one is going to produce better results? It's a long run. I just think you mentioned one last question. Just a quick comment on this. First of all, I don't know what has happened to AID over the decades, but when I was in Indonesia in the 80s, virtually every chancellor of every university was a product of something called the Kentucky program, which wasn't just University of Kentucky, those big 10 schools, funded by AID. And it was a huge asset for the United States to have these people there. But by the 1980s, AID had decided, I don't think they've changed their minds, that higher education is an elite good and therefore we don't fund it from development funds, which is crazy in my view for all the reasons you've just said. The second comment I would make is if you wanna do something seriously along the lines of what you're talking about, I would at least explore the possibility of getting a line item in the defense budget for this purpose, because what you run into is anytime you talk about taking money from one department and putting it to another, not only run into more resistance in that department, but more importantly, you run into unbelievable resistance from the jurisdictional committees on the Hill. We tried, when I was at the Pentagon, to take some money for peacekeeping support from DOD and transfer it to state, and it was like Hill getting it done. It's easier to, it's probably, I mean the defense budget has environmental protect, a whole bunch of things that you would be surprised to find in there, this might be a good addition. All I'm doing is coming out with a proposition. No, I realize that. Okay, so what is it? One soldier to one foreign student train? Is it equal or not? If it is equal, then I'm telling you, it's, it's, you know. Thank you for this program. It's really been enlightening. Excuse my voice. It's temporarily departed. I'm Ronna Freiberg. I'm with LSI Associates, which is a consulting firm here in Washington. I'm former USIA and State Department. My question focuses on English language learning. You mentioned that all the courses are conducted at the academy in English. You also mentioned that Timmy and Anga both learned English in three and a half years. First question is, do most of your students come to the program with limited English ability? Zero. Okay, second question, how do you do it? I am, but with such a success rate. We put them and they have to speak on the campus to each other in English and we, you know, so it's immersed learning. And, you know, we also teach them how to sit there and you jump up and raise your hands and all that because, you know, culturally it's, you sit down and you don't speak until, I tell you to speak, et cetera, et cetera, and you don't learn that way, you know, but I can, you can ask this question over there. But basically, the reason that we have to teach in English is because, like I said earlier, this is a resource that this country has that nobody recognizes. You are the only country that has the capacity to take in that many foreign students. Okay, what's China gonna do? Send 200,000 students to Australia? That'll be 1% of the Australian population. You can't do it. This is the only country where, you know, and the Chinese have figured this out and they're sending you 200,000 of their students. You know, so what is it that they understand about higher education that we don't or that we're missing? Okay, I went to the East-West Center in Hawaii and they were saying, oh yeah, I'm sorry, we got delayed because we just had to finish off with the Chinese delegation. I said, oh yeah, and what do they want? They said, well, they told us that they want to send 10,000 teachers, and our job is to find places for those 10,000 teachers, but they will pay for it. Okay, so, you know, so we can sit there and say, whatever, you know, you have your fears, you're gonna compete with China, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, but there's an understanding and we're gonna sit there and learn everything we can. So that's what I'm saying, as an export commodity, okay, you are the only country that has this capacity. And so, you know, when we were looking at it and said, okay, where do I send my kids? It's only the U.S. that we can send them to. Okay, then we sit there and say, okay, I got 250 Timmy's coming in every year. I came for it, okay? Because I promised these kids, I say, you make it to the academy, I personally guarantee that they will get a tertiary education. Now, you do the math. Okay, I can't send them all to the U.S., okay? And that's when we came out and sat there and talked and said, okay, fine. Okay, now I've reduced the cost by half. Now, I just got to figure out how to reduce the cost even more. And that's when it comes to student loans, and that's why I'm very appreciative for the DCA facility that we have from the USAID, okay? But more can be done, okay? So what are the, you know, if you sit there and talk about student loans or the DCA, okay? So what guarantees do you need? Okay, so X-team bank says, okay, you guarantee 100, if I got to guarantee 100% then what the hell do I need you for? Okay, so that's where we are. I mean, if to me foreign policy has to be reformed, okay, you're spending so much money all across everything. And what impact do you get? Okay, I was in Ache. I'm not trying to de-write anybody from USAID or World Bank even, okay? I went to Ache and I saw, I went to visit some schools there. And I saw them, kindergarten, painting. Oh yeah, we have this program now for kindergarten to paint, you know, on a piece of paper. And it's for today. And it's sponsored by USAID. I didn't see one representative of USAID there. And how much money are you spending on that one day? Give them crayons? But what are you achieving? Okay, so to me it's a lot of waste. You know, I was joking with Ted on the plane on the way here. I said to him, it seems like all these institutions are getting old. Fulbright is 60 years old, I don't know, you know. And it's like us when we get old, the mind wants to do something, the body just came to it. So we had to start working on putting some bionics into our systems. With that, let me thank Mr. Semperna. Thank you, Dr. Carpenter, and ask you to join me in thanking me. Thank you very much. And thanks to Timmy and Anga. So please do have a chance to chat with Timmy and Anga while they're here. Thank you.