Transforming higher education in Vietnam - Tác giả Nita Temmerman

Vietnam is a rapidly growing and dynamic country with a relatively young population. It has seen a remarkable increase in the number of students entering higher education in the past 20 or so years.

The Vietnam government has also responded to the need to meet the employment demands of various industries and professions by increasing funding for education. This has seen an expansion in the number of vocational education and training (VET) providers as well as universities to meet the pressure for skilled workers, especially in areas such as information and communications technology (ICT), tourism and healthcare.

However, there is still some way to go before Vietnam’s education system can be said to truly provide what is required to meet the country’s emerging economic and social demands.

Higher education in Vietnam includes specialised colleges, teacher training colleges, public and private universities as well as institutions governed by cooperatives that are wholly funded through tuition fees.

In the past 10 or so years, there has been significant growth in the number of private for-profit higher education institutions that tend to specialise in niche demand fields, such as accounting and ICT. Some of these are undeniably of lower academic quality.

To date, no Vietnamese universities are ranked in the world’s top 1,000 universities (based on well-known world university rankings). The regulatory environment is highly bureaucratic and centralised through the Ministry of Education and Training (MOET), which has authority over education, including higher education.

MOET decides education policy and implementation expectations that extend to rules about student admissions as well as what is included in the taught curriculum and the setting of textbooks. MOET is gradually handing more independence to higher education institutions. However, progress to date remains rather gradual.

Curriculum reform

The curriculum delivered, on the whole, does not adequately prepare graduates with the competencies or attributes required by employers. It is a curriculum that emphasises rote memorisation, is textbook-centric and comprises incessant assessments and high-stake examinations.

Many VET and university courses do not feature work-based learning opportunities or industry placements, so omit valuable, actual practical experience from students’ learning.

Approximately only 30%-35% of students are admitted into higher education, which occurs via students passing very demanding exams. Private conversations with university officials reveal that parents desperate for their son or daughter to gain entry to a university offer bribes to university administrators to ensure admission.

However, the government is acutely aware of the need to make some essential changes to its education system, including the reliance currently placed on examinations as the key measure of students’ aptitude, and so bring it more in line with practices in other developed countries.