Education is name of the game

Nguyen Minh Thuyet

In light of the recently approved Vietnam human resources development planning, 158 new universities will be founded from now until 2015, which will rise to 573 by 2020. What’s your view?

First of all we need to explain why Vietnam needs such a big number of nearly 600 universities and colleges.

In 2010, the National Assembly Standing Committee founded a group to supervise investments and formulations of colleges and universities across the country. At that time Vietnam was home to 400 higher education facilities with most of them coming into existence in 2006. Large amounts of such facilities could not satisfy minimum requirements for higher education training bases.

Many such facilities could not recruit lecturers or their teaching faculties mainly consisted of visiting lecturers or retired teachers. Those training facilities then offer gloomy development prospects.

In my view, what we lack are quality colleges and vocational training schools amid feeble universities.

Around VND2.135 trillion ($103.1 million) would be demanded for human resources development planning until 2020. Is that a colossal amount?

I think we must make clear where and how much we spend and what is the investment efficiency. The prospect for luring investment capital into education via education socialisation schemes will not be bright as actual investment figures are unremarkable.

The approved planning did mention forming training alliances and wooing foreign investment into education to ameliorate higher education quality. Is that feasible?

In fact we were running several cooperative training models with international universities like student exchanges between Vietnamese and foreign universities, but exchange students remain modest.

Some foreign universities have been to Vietnam to shake hands with local partners in tailoring specific training programmes. However, contributions by those foreign entities mostly leverage on their local partners’ resources. Besides, reality shows that a number of such foreign training entitis are of low quality.

Why has Vietnam not geared efforts towards bettering the quality of major universities such as the National University, the Agricultural University or the University of Natural Sciences.

The Vietnam National University Hanoi’s expansion programme was long on the agenda, however, but just a small portion of the programme was completed. Construction of Ho Chi Minh City National University just started with insignificant capital distribution.

It is now the right time to woo foreign investment into local education sector development?

Based on current practices I have yet to see good prospects in this regard.

We can cooperate with foreign universities in professional aspects such as exchanges of students.

In respect to mobilising investments, it is unlikely that a foreign university, an individual or organisation will bring cash to Vietnam to found a higher education training base. I think even with domestic investment we shall only licence big investment projects on founding universities or colleges with clear feasible plans.