Ketepatan Sasaran yang Terganggu: Kesenjangan Data dan Diskresi Kebijakan dalam Implementasi Program KIP-Kuliah

Abstract

The Kartu Indonesia Pintar Kuliah (KIP-K) program was designed as an affirmative instrument to break the intergenerational cycle of poverty through access to higher education, yet this ambitious goal faces a persistent problem of targeting accuracy. This article aims to analyze data gaps among KIP-K recipients, identify the structural factors that hinder and support targeting accuracy, and examine the role of policy discretion as a corrective instrument in realizing educational justice. The study employs a conceptual-qualitative approach based on a literature review, examining policy documents, government reports, and nationally and internationally indexed journal articles, analyzed through the frameworks of policy implementation theory, street-level bureaucracy, Rawlsian distributive justice, and Sen's capability approach. The analysis shows that data gaps among KIP-K recipients occur through three distinct mechanisms visibility gap, document-production advantage, and temporal lag each rooted in the weaknesses of the Integrated Social Welfare Data infrastructure, institutional fragmentation across agencies, and unstandardized discretion exercised by campus operators. Policy discretion, although prone to misuse, has the potential to become an adaptive corrective instrument if institutionalized through a structured discretion model encompassing field verification, standard operating procedures, documentation, transparency, and public accountability. This article concludes that data governance reform and the formalization of discretion are two agendas that must proceed in tandem to realize distributive justice in national scholarship programs.