"Objective: This study analyzes how resource management failures (budget allocation, teacher distribution, accessibility, and infrastructure) shape educational inequality in Indonesia’s frontier, outermost, and disadvantaged (3T) border regions, taking Papua (bordering Papua New Guinea) and West Kalimantan (bordering Sarawak, Malaysia) as its objects of study.
Methodology: A qualitative descriptive approach analyzed national news and social media content (Twitter/X, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube) from 2020–2025, selected with education-inequality keywords. Data were coded in NVivo 15 (six stages, including thematic and matrix coding) and triangulated with Statistics Indonesia (BPS) data and regional studies.
Results: NVivo coding identified four dominant dimensions of inequality: lack of resources (29%), teacher shortages (25%), limited accessibility (25%), and inadequate infrastructure (18%). The Special Physical Allocation Fund for Education fell by 85.6%, from IDR 15.3 trillion (2024) to IDR 2.2 trillion (2025), while the Frontline Teacher Program, the Smart Indonesia Card (KIP), and school digitalization fell short of their targets. Participation in Papua drops from 94.69% at primary level to 19.03% at undergraduate level, while West Kalimantan’s border districts show uneven school networks and weak coordination.
Conclusion: Educational inequality in Indonesia’s border regions is rooted in dysfunctional resource management, not only in resource scarcity, as shown by non-contextual policy design, cross-sectoral fragmentation, fiscal inconsistency, and weak monitoring.
Limitations: The study relies on digital media and secondary data without field observation, was coded by a single coder, and covers two border regions in 2020–2025.
Contribution: The study offers policymakers and education-governance researchers an evidence-based framework that distinguishes resource scarcity from resource-management failure."