Vietnam - Absence of a clear vision

Great deals of money, time, and efforts are being spent on improving the quality of the country’s human resources, with the emphasis and all the hopes laid on tertiary education, all to no avail as such huge inputs fail to pay off.

The truth is that education has been disconnected from all other actors in the society, so to say, and all investments regretfully turn wastes of assets.

The grim reality, as observed on local media these days, points to the fact that higher education has for long braced for rampant development without a rightful steering wheel. It is, in short, a lack of vision.

The chaos in higher education emerges strikingly this week when, as reported on Tuoi Tre, numerous universities nationwide announce closure of several faculties for failures to enroll enough students as the deadline of October 10 set by the education ministry went by. This outcome, in fact, has been anticipated long ago when universities and colleges during weeks ahead of the deadline harshly competed with one another to woo students. Cheap tools have been employed, including schools offering commission to brokers bringing students to them, donating sums of money to students who put their names down to attend the school, or illegally lowering the scores threshold to make entrance easier for students.

The chaotic picture is due to the fact that tertiary education institutions have been springing like mushrooms. Universities and colleges are established in every corner of the country, with all cities and provinces but Dak Nong having at least one higher education institution.

In the past ten years, the number of universities nationwide excluding colleges has surged from 69 to 163, according to Vietnamnet. Within a similar time span from 1998 to 2009, says Tuoi Tre, up to 307 tertiary education institutions were established in the country, including those upgraded from secondary schools.

Under a master plan endorsed by the Government for the development of tertiary education institutions in the 2006-2020, the country’s Red River Delta should have 125 universities and colleges by 2020, but by 2009, the real number has shot up to 143 schools, comprising of 78 universities and 65 colleges, says Thanh Nien. The newspaper also mentions the imbalance between universities and colleges, quoting a report of the National Assembly as warning last year that universities accounted for 72.3% while colleges only 27.7%, although the country needs more skilled technicians than so-called intellectuals.

In a report released in Hanoi on Thursday, the World Bank rings a bell of alarm regarding tertiary education quality in Vietnam, saying the higher-education system has been severed from all other facets of the economy.

“Higher education does not produce the expected results because higher education institutions are ‘disconnected’ from the other actors at the core of the higher education system,” the global institution says in its report titled “Putting Higher Education to Work: Skills and Research for Productivity and Growth in East Asia.”

The World Bank suggests that for Vietnam to continue its rapid growth and achieve continued technological deepening, higher education must “address skills gaps through better graduate quality and more inclusiveness; and encourage selected University-Industry Linkages to improve curriculum relevance, support entrepreneurship, and help with technological upgrading.”

All the confusion and chaos in the country’s higher education system, according to Vietnamnet, unveils the fact that Vietnam’s education system has been mired in disorder.

As suggested by the World Bank, tertiary education institutions fail to equip graduates with the skills demanded of them in the society. Schools are driven by profits rather than by the inner urge to contribute to socio-economic development, and therefore, their curriculums are out of touch with the real life.

In advanced countries, the tertiary education system is likened to a triangle with the pointed top representing the elite group of schools providing the society with well-equipped, learned people that form the driving force in the research-and-development area, while the broad bottom represents the widespread workforce of skilled technicians and workers. The triangle is turned upside down in Vietnam, with universities and colleges on the broad top yielding en masse those people with half-hearted theories, and the pointed bottom is where few students with skills are enrolled, says Sai Gon Tiep Thi.

In a meeting in HCMC last week to discuss the draft strategy on education chaired by Education Minister Pham Vu Luan and HCMC Chairman Le Hoang Quan, several experts blamed the lack of a clear vision in the development of higher education in Vietnam as the root cause.

Huynh Cong Minh, former director of the HCMC Department of Education and Training, called for the establishment of a powerful education council responsible for mapping out the development of the country’s human resources, according to Sai Gon Tiep Thi. Meanwhile, Phan Thanh Binh, rector of the Vietnam National University in HCMC, pondered the blurred vision.

“The draft strategy fails to identify the position of Vietnam’s education now and also fails to point out its vision for development by 2020,” Binh was quoted on Sai Gon Tiep Thi as saying.

Son Nguyen - The Saigon Times Daily

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