Jakarta Masa Depan Program Serves Thousands of Students
The MDJ Program is an educational assistance and student development initiative administered by BAZNAS (BAZIS) DKI Jakarta. In 2026, the program served 3,016 students from 35 partner universities. Each recipient received an annual grant of Rp6 million, with total funding reaching Rp18.096 billion. Since its launch in 2019, the program had reached 24,304 cumulative beneficiaries.
Beyond financial assistance, MDJ provides academic mentoring, life skills training, leadership development, and other self-development activities. This makes the quality of program management and student support relevant to the overall experience of beneficiaries.
The researchers also reported an initial pre-survey involving 30 MDJ recipients. About 63.3% said they were not satisfied, with complaints involving communication, limited mentoring intensity, slow responses to student needs, and unequal involvement in mentoring activities. These experiences formed the background for examining program manager competence, mentoring quality, perceived organizational support, student engagement, and student satisfaction.
Research Involved 237 MDJ Recipients
The research used a quantitative survey conducted online from February to June 2026. The population consisted of 3,016 active MDJ recipients, while 237 valid responses were selected from 242 submitted responses using purposive sampling.
Participants were active recipients who had taken part in at least one coaching or mentoring activity. The researchers used a 47-item questionnaire with a five-point response scale to measure five areas: program manager competence, student mentoring quality, perceived organizational support, student engagement, and student satisfaction.
The data were analyzed using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) with SmartPLS 4. The analysis included tests of whether the questionnaire items adequately measured the intended concepts before examining relationships between the variables.
Measurement Problems Limited the Findings
The most important result of the study was not a confirmation of the proposed relationships, but a problem with the measurement instrument.
All questionnaire indicators had outer loading values below the commonly used 0.70 threshold, ranging from 0.266 to 0.575. Average Variance Extracted (AVE) values ranged from 0.163 to 0.224, while Cronbach’s Alpha values ranged from 0.424 to 0.563. These results did not meet the study’s stated requirements for convergent validity and reliability.
The test of whether the five concepts could be distinguished from one another also produced unfavorable results. HTMT values ranged from 1.196 to 1.883, exceeding the study’s threshold. The highest value occurred between perceived organizational support and student satisfaction, at 1.883. Six of the 47 indicators also had their strongest loading on a different construct from the one they were intended to measure.
As a result, the researchers concluded that the five constructs could not be empirically distinguished using the collected data.
Statistical Relationships Were Reported With an Important Caveat
The structural analysis nevertheless produced statistically significant results for all ten hypotheses. For example, the reported coefficient between mentoring quality and student engagement was 0.396, while the coefficient between student engagement and satisfaction was 0.304.
The model also reported R² values of 0.516 for student engagement and 0.621 for student satisfaction. However, the authors explicitly cautioned that these values should not be interpreted as genuine theoretical explanatory power because the underlying measurement model had failed to establish valid and reliable constructs.
Therefore, the statistical coefficients should not be presented as evidence that better mentoring, stronger management competence, or greater organizational support actually causes higher student satisfaction. The article describes these results as data-processing findings rather than substantive evidence of relationships between the variables.
Researchers Recommend Improving the Instrument First
The researchers identified several possible reasons for the weak measurement results. The 47-item online questionnaire may have contributed to respondent fatigue. Some questions may also have been interpreted differently by respondents, while responses were heavily concentrated on scores of four and five, reducing variation in the data.
For future research, Azidah, Mulyanti, and Soma recommend conducting pilot testing and psychometric validation before repeating the full structural analysis. They also recommend making questionnaire items more specific and easier to understand, reducing the number of items where appropriate, and using response formats that encourage greater variation.
The authors further recommend exploratory factor analysis during the pilot stage before testing the complete structural model. For MDJ program management, they state that policy improvements based on this particular statistical model should be postponed until a valid and reliable measurement instrument is available.
Implications for Education Assistance Programs
The study highlights the importance of measuring student experiences accurately before using survey results to guide program decisions. For education assistance programs such as MDJ, information about communication, mentoring, organizational support, engagement, and satisfaction can potentially inform service improvements, but such information needs to be collected through instruments that reliably measure each concept.
The authors' central contribution is therefore methodological. Rather than establishing which program factors determine student satisfaction, the study identifies the need for stronger measurement before those relationships can be assessed reliably.
In the authors' interpretation, the results show that the MDJ research model cannot yet provide valid empirical answers about the relationships between program manager competence, mentoring quality, organizational support, student engagement, and student satisfaction.
Author Profile
Rasidah Azidah, Rita Yuni Mulyanti, and A.M Soma are affiliated with the Program Studi Magister Manajemen, Universitas Teknologi Muhammadiyah Jakarta, Indonesia. The article does not provide individual academic degrees or detailed professional expertise for each author, so these details are not specified here beyond the information documented in the publication.
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