Elita Pertiwi and Raden Muhamad Purnagunawan – As one of the largest cities in the world, Jakarta needs a massive urban cleaning force to keep the city relatively clean. For many young Indonesians, including highly skilled university graduates, that is the kind of job opportunity they are willing to fight for.
In June 2025, the Jakarta administration opened 1,023 positions at the city's Public Facility Management Agency (PPSU), known as pasukan oranye (the orange squad), across 239 kelurahan (urban villages or sub-districts) More than 7,000 people applied for the job. This was not surprising. The minimum requirement for a PPSU job was only a primary-school certificate or simply the ability to read and write. What was surprising is that many applicants had university degrees.
In Serdang, Central Jakarta, 127 people applied for a single vacancy. Seven had bachelor's degrees. Two of them, Nabila and Febrina Nuranisa, were accounting graduates who said that they had struggled to find work. Janitorial jobs had nothing to do with balance sheets or financial records. They involved cleaning, hoeing and maintaining the neighbourhood.
In Cipayung, East Jakarta, 326 people applied for six PPSU positions. One of them was Khoirunnisa, a 21-year-old communications student in need of an income to pay her tuition. She had applied for jobs in the service and banking sectors, but without success.
Two uniforms, one problem
Indonesia now has two familiar images of graduate hardship, each with its own distinctive colour: the graduate in a green ojol (online motorcycle-taxi) jacket, and the graduate in an orange PPSU vest.
They are usually told as separate stories. But both point to the same condition: graduates working in jobs that do not require the qualifications they spent years acquiring.
Economists call this overeducation, and in urban Indonesia it has become the norm. A 2025 BPS publication finds that 22.36 per cent of young workers nationally are overeducated. Likewise, our analysis of the August 2024 National Labour Force Survey (Survei Angkatan Kerja Nasional, Sakernas), found that six in ten urban Gen Z wage earners with bachelor qualifications or higher are employed in jobs below their level of education.
The difference between the green and orange uniforms lies in the kind of insecurity each represents.
Ojol offers quick access to income, with low entry barriers and no competition for a fixed number of vacancies. According to the Segara Research Institute, around 17 per cent of ojol drivers hold university degrees, although some may use it only to supplement income from other low-paid work.
But that accessibility comes with limited protection. As non-salaried workers, ojol drivers have no guaranteed monthly wage, and their earnings fluctuate with demand. The World Bank's 2022 survey found that only around a third of gig workers were enrolled in any social security scheme, and just 17 per cent were saving for retirement.
PPSU offers the opposite trade-off. It requires fixed shifts and is far less flexible, but provides a predictable wage and social protection. Entry, however, is fiercely competitive. In 2025, monthly pay was set at Jakarta's provincial minimum wage of Rp5,396,761 and included BPJS health and employment insurance, as well as the annual religious-holiday allowance, or THR.
The 'gig' industry is relatively easy to enter but offers little protection. PPSU offers more secure employment, but only to a small number of applicants. In both cases, graduates are working, but not in the roles society imagines to be the natural destination of a degree.
Structural, not personal issues
It is tempting to blame the graduates themselves. Perhaps they chose the wrong degree, did not work hard enough or expected too much from higher education?
But the data points to a broader explanation. Indonesia has rapidly expanded the supply of educated workers, while the demand for graduate-level skills has not grown at the same pace. The tertiary gross enrolment ratio nearly tripled, from around 16 per cent in 2003 to almost 45 per cent in 2023. The share of people aged 25 and over with at least a bachelor's degree nearly doubled, from 4.9 per cent in 2011 to 9.3 per cent in 2023.
This is a genuine national achievement, central to the vision of Indonesia Emas 2045 (Golden Indonesia 2045). The problem is that the economy has not created enough suitable jobs for this growing graduate population.
Indonesian employment is still dominated by informal work. In 2023, informal employment accounted for around 48 per cent of urban employment and a huge 72 per cent of rural employment. Formal wage jobs requiring professional or technical skills remain limited even as more graduates enter the labour market each year.
Open unemployment (where a person willing to work cannot find any kind of job) tells only part of the story. Between 2015 and 2025, unemployment fell across all education groups, but the pattern barely changed. Vocational-school graduates still faced the highest rate, at 8.6 per cent in 2025. University unemployment stood at 5.4 per cent, more than twice the rate among people with primary education or less.
The lower rate among the least educated does not necessarily indicate better prospects, since open unemployment does not capture those already absorbed into informal, low-paid or insecure work.
When the supply of educated workers grows faster than the number of skilled jobs, many graduates take whatever work is available rather than remain unemployed, even if it means working well below their qualifications.
What would actually help
The wrong response is to lecture graduates about ambition or resilience. It would also be a mistake to conclude that Indonesia simply has too many graduates.
The deeper problem is not education itself, but the structure of labour demand, in which too few firms and sectors create jobs that use graduate skills, while too many of the jobs that do exist remain informal, poorly paid or weakly protected.
Indonesia often judges its major investment and industrial programmes by capital realised, factories opened, and exports generated. These indicators matter, but they do not reveal whether the resulting jobs provide stable wages, social insurance, training or opportunities for advancement. Investment incentives should therefore be assessed not only by how many jobs they create, but also by the quality of those jobs.
Informal workers can register with BPJS Employment under its Non-Wage Recipient Workers programme (BPU, Bukan Penerima Upah), but effective coverage remains limited. The priority is therefore to expand effective coverage among platform workers, casual workers and others in non-standard jobs.
Universities should equip students with transferable twenty-first-century skills, including critical thinking, problem-solving, communication, digital literacy and adaptability, rather than preparing them only for specific jobs.
But none of these policies is sufficient on its own.
The queue in Serdang should not be treated as a story of personal hardship. Nabila, Febrina and Khoirunnisa assessed the employment conditions available to them. On one side was a degree without a suitable job. On the other was work below their education level, but with a reliable wage and basic protection.
They read the labour market correctly. It is the labour market that needs to be corrected.