CfDS Research Press Conference: The Rising Trend of Industry 4.0-Related Majors in Universities

Yogyakarta, 2 May 2019 – Several new industry 4.0-related majors were popular during the Joint Entrance Selection of State Universities (SBMPTN) 2018. Majors such as Digital Business and Actuarial Sciences were among them.

This finding is one of the research outputs of the Centre for Digital Society’s Digital Intelligence Lab. The readiness of universities and talks about higher education institutions were the main topics of this event.

“We predict that the growth of these new majors, which greatly correlates with the demands of the industry 4.0, will continue in the next few years,” as stated by Treviliana Eka Putri, the manager of the Digital Intelligence Lab.

Universitas Gadjah Mada has opened Actuarial Sciences as a major under the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences in 2018. This major combines the science of financial risk management through mathematics and statistics by using computer programs.

Furthermore, there is a lack of big data laboratories in Indonesia. There are only several universities that possesses a big data laboratory, such as Universitas Gadjah Mada, Universitas Indonesia, Universitas Hasanudin, Institut Teknologi Bandung, Universitas Telkom and Universitas Bina Nusantara.

Previously, the researchers predicted that there will be an increase of applicants on STEM-related majors. However, within the past three years, the fastest growing majors are foreign languages and education. New majors such as Digital Business and Actuarial Sciences also grew faster compared other new majors.

In order to gain the necessary data for this research, API and Webscraper were utilized to map the existing data on Twitter. From the mapping process, 13,536 original tweets were found, which triggered 69,133 responses as a whole.