Vietnam - Low quality universities making their way to penetrate into Vietnam

VietNamNet Bridge – In order to save money, a lot of students register to follow the joint training programs between Vietnamese and foreign schools, instead of going studying abroad. Meanwhile, some experts believe that the study only brings money and time waste.


Low quality schools penetrating into Vietnam

Dr Le Viet Khuyen, former Deputy Director of the University Education Department, said that a lot of unaccredited schools have arrived in Vietnam. Khuyen has been well known as the educator who warns about the low quality of many foreign universities which are the partners of Vietnamese schools.

Khuyen has given a lot of parents and students a start when it said on Tien phong newspaper that Vietnam still cannot control joint training programs. “I do not say that all the training programs have low quality. However, I can say that the risks are very high,” he said.

The degrees provided by the schools are just the ones granted under the framework of the cooperation between the two sides. Meanwhile, the degrees will not be recognized by the countries where the schools are located, and will not be recognized internationally. In general, the degrees can only be valid in Vietnam.

Vietnamese schools always affirm that the curriculums applied in joint training programs are the ones provided by the foreign partner schools. However, Khuyen said that in fact, the curriculums applied in Vietnam do not retain the same quality as the original ones. In order to have the same quality, it is necessary to spend money on documents, textbooks, teaching methods and other works.

In the US, there are about 1500 accredited schools, and there is the same number of schools which have not been accredited. Of course, the schools do not have high training quality. A lot of the schools have been trying to make their way to penetrate into Vietnam.

According to Khuyen, a lot of Vietnamese officials have been studying at the schools for just tens of days to obtain doctorate. In fact, Vietnam can verify schools and give accreditations to schools, so that people can have information about the schools they plan to study at. However, this has not been done.

Khuyen has been attributed this to bad management over the operation of schools. In principle, the watchdog agency needs to force schools to have accredited to ensure that only prestigious schools can provide training services in Vietnam.

It is unfeasible to require that the training quality that foreign schools provide in Vietnam has to be better than that in their home countries. However, Khuyen thinks that it is necessary to request foreign schools to commit that the quality is equal to the training quality in their home countries, i.e. that the value of the degrees they provide in Vietnam is the same with the one provided in their home countries.

However, it is clear that foreign schools which are the partners of Vietnamese schools in joint training programs can make such commitments.

In Vietnam there are the programs on training high quality engineers, like the ones at the Hanoi University of Technology and University of Transport. The training quality of the programs is required to be the same with the quality of big schools in France. The graduates of the programs will obtain the degrees recognized internationally. 

However, Khuyen said that with the current bad management, it is very difficult to obtain the agencies which can appraise the quality of joint training programs.

Commenting about the four “excellent universities”, Khuyen said that this is an “odd name” which cannot be seen in any other countries in the world.

“Schools need to prove their high quality before they are recognized as “excellent,” while the quality of “excellent” should not be given to newly established schools,” Khuyen said.

Vietnam has set up a goal that one of the four schools would be added into the list of the world’s top 200 universities. Meanwhile, the goal has been considered as a very difficult task, like bringing man to the moon.

Source: Tien phong


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