New Paradigm of Cash Waqf in Financing Muhammadiyah Higher Education: Hybrid Waqf Model as an Islamic Social Financial Innovation

Financing higher education in Indonesia still faces significant challenges, particularly related to limited funding, quality disparities between universities, and high tuition fees. Muhammadiyah, as one of the largest Islamic organizations, possesses significant waqf assets, but their utilization for higher education financing has not been optimal.

This study proposes a Hybrid Financing model as an innovation in managing cash waqf for education. Hybrid Financing combines waqf funds with other financial sources, both social and commercial, to increase the impact and sustainability of the waqf program. This model has been successfully implemented in several countries such as IsDB-BISEW, Bangladesh, and by the Al-Azhar Education Institution. To optimize cash waqf, multi-stakeholder synergy is needed involving the government, Islamic financial institutions, educational institutions, the private sector, and the community.

With a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) approach to 30 selected academic articles (2019–2024)relevant to cash waqf, hybrid financing, and higher education financing. Data were analyzed thematically with expert judgment validation from two educational waqf experts. The results showed that the hybrid waqf model that combines social funds (waqf, infaq, grants) with commercial funds (sharia investment, green sukuk, sharia shares) can improve the sustainability of education financing, reduce dependence on tuition fees, and expand access to scholarships. Implementation in PTMA requires professional governance, increased waqf literacy, and multi-stakeholder collaboration. When implemented in Muhammadiyah universities, hybrid waqf can serve as a program to finance affordable, high-quality education and produce multiple positive effects, such as providing scholarship programs for high-achieving and underprivileged students, supporting the welfare of lecturers and educational staff, developing university facilities and infrastructure, and promoting. The contribution of this study lies in the development of a hybrid waqf implementation framework that is adaptive to the context of Islamic higher education in Indonesia.