The Interest of Prospective Students in Study Programs in Higher Education: a Preliminary Study

The purpose of this research was to describe the interest of prospective students in study programs in public higher education in Indonesia. Data of enrollment selection participants to all public higher education were drawn from the official website SBMPTN in the year 2014. A number of samples were 37 of public higher education that was chosen by proportional random sampling according to the division of public higher education regions. Participants data was analyzed descriptively about that percentage of each study program in a field of science-and-technology and social-and-humanities. Furthermore, analyzed of the percentage and the probability ratio of prospective students who interested in mathematics education and pure mathematics. The results showed that the number of prospective students who interesting in a field of a science-and-technology tend to be greater than the number of them in a field of social-and-humanities. Medical Education, Informatics Engineering Education, and Civil Engineering were study programs that were interested in any region for the science-and-technology field. Elementary Teacher Education, English Study, Accounting, Law, and Management were study programs that were interested in any region for social-andhumanity field. The rank of Mathematics Education was always in the top position of the Pure Mathematics. The election probability of Mathematics Education came to be more greater then the election probability of Pure Mathematics.