Vietnam - NA’s education committee proposes to dissolve low quality universities

VietNamNet Bridge – Universities have been mushrooming in Vietnam under the people founded schools. But most of them have low quality training and poor material facilities, the report on supervising the implementation of the National Assembly’s resolutions on university education reads.

In July 2012 – December 2012, the National Assembly’s mission examined 50 out of the 419 university education establishments in different localities throughout the country. To date, the National Assembly’s Committee for Culture, Education, the Youth and Children, have received the reports from 264 out of the 419 establishments and local authorities.

According to Dao Trong Thi, Chair of the committee, a lot of positive changes have been seen over the last three years in the establishment of new schools. The training quality has been highlighted as the most important factor when considering licensing schools, while local authorities did not just try to set up as more schools as possible.

However, Thi noted that since the watchdog agencies and local authorities were not determined enough, the number of the schools newly established in 2010 and 2011 was still relatively high.

He also noted that there exists the reasonable school development programming. Most of the schools upgraded or newly built recently are located in the developed economic regions or the advantageous localities, such as the Red River Delta, with 13 schools, and the east of the southern region, with six schools.

Meanwhile, the training majors have been designed not based on the society’s demand and the antioanl human resource development program. As a result, a high proportion of university graduates in some fields have been left redundant, while Vietnam still lacks the workforce in many other important business fields.

The monitoring report has also found out that universities have failed to fulfill their commitments when applying for establishing the schools. The investors could only fulfill 50 percent of what they have promised. Especially, the Phu Tho Economics Junior College, for example, has only done 10 percent of its commitments on upgrading the material facilities of the school.

Regarding the teaching staff, the schools all have promised to recruit enough permanent lecturers to ensure the high quality of the training (the permanent lecturers have to ensure to undertake 70 percent of the curriculums).

However, in fact, Thanh Dong, Dong A Technology Universities, the Rubber Industry Junior College, and the Quang Ngai Technical Industry Junior College have been found as having less than 50 permanent lecturers.

Due to the lack of the financial capability, the poor teaching staff and bad material facilities, most of the people founded schools have been focusing on enrolling students for the training majors which do not require high investments and complicated laboratories or equipments, such as business administration, finance and banking, and foreign languages.

Citing too many problems existing in the university education, the committee believes that it would be better to dissolve the low quality schools to better provide the university education. Only the schools which can meet the requirements in the material facilities and training quality can exist to be sure that the schools can produce high qualification graduates.

However, observers said it would be not easy to dissolve the schools. In recent years, the Ministry of Education and Training has become the aiming point of the criticism from people founded schools which say that the ministry, though being the “father” of the school, has abandoned the child, leaving the schools in serious thirst for students.

Nguyen Thao – Nguyen Hien

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