JAKARTA - After an extended period, Indonesian International Student Mobility Awards, or IISMA, officially closed its registration on 8 March 2023. The number of students enrolled on the IISMA website in 2023 was 10,496 students, which was obviously higher than the previous year's 7,501 students. In this year, there are a lot of students who have been prepared their IELTS and TOEFL, as a result, the number of colleges that only accept EPT from TOEFL/IELTS is increasing, and also students from batch 2020 are required to take MBKM, therefore there are very high interest in IISMA this year.

According to the Ministry of Education and Culture's statistics data for IISMA 2023 candidates, Keio University is the most preferred host university, either as a first or second option. A total of 838 college students chose Keio University from among the 7.664 candidates that registered on the IISMA website. The second most preferred university is the University of Padua, with 788 applicants; the third is Universitat Pompeu Fabra, with 694 applicants.  

Keio University is the oldest institute of western higher education in Japan, and currently ranked 197th based on QS World University Rankings 2023. At 2022, Motohiro Tsuchiya as a Vice-President for Global Engagement and Information Technology at Keio University said that he was interested with the concept of IISMA and he would like to register Keio University as a partner of the Ministry of Education and Culture and Research and Technology, so that all Indonesian college students could choose Keio University as their option at IISMA.

Not only Keio University, but many universities have been enrolled as new partners of the Ministry of Education and Culture at IISMA 2023. University of Chicago, Osaka University, Victoria University of Wellington, M. V. Lomonosov Moscow State University, Sciences Po, and others are examples. But there are also other universities that will no longer be host universities in 2023. It had a significant influence on a large number of applications at certain specific universities, such as the removal of the University of Pecs as a destination university, because it drove many students to chose Palacky University Olomouc or Universitat Pompeu Fabra as alternative universities. 

IISMA is one of the best programs offered by the Ministry of Education and Culture.  Any international students who wish to pursue a bachelor's degree at one of Indonesia's institutions may be eligible to apply for this program and it is an excellent choice for them  if they want to study abroad in another country without having to think about tuition fees.