Vietnam - The movement of studying abroad challenges domestic education

VietNamNet Bridge – Going to study abroad has become a movement in Vietnam, especially in big urban areas. More and more parents and students feel unsatisfactory about the Vietnamese education and believe that studying overseas is the best way for them to get knowledge and get job promotion.

Pham Tam Anh, a 10th grader of the High School for the Gifted--majoring in foreign language, belonging to the Hanoi National University, said she is proud of the wonderful school. However, Anh still plans to leave Vietnam in July for the US, where she would continue the general education program.

When asked why Anh decided to study in the US, she said that the US is following an education system which allows students to develop their abilities in different fields. Here students can attend extracurricular activities and social campaigns.

“In Vietnam, students have to take on 12-13 subjects in every semester. Meanwhile, in the US, students have to take on 5-7 subjects,” Anh said, adding that while studying at a general school in the US, she hopes she would more easily find scholarship for her university study.

Tam Anh is one of the nearly 20,000 Vietnamese students who plan to go studying in the US in 2012. According to the US Embassy, the number of Vietnamese students in the US has been increasing rapidly in recent years. Only 5000 students studied in the US in 2007, while the figure rose to 13,000 in 2009.

Nguyen An Quyen, Director of IvyPrep, an overseas study consultancy firm, has affirmed that more and more students plan to go studying abroad.

“Vietnam needs qualified workforce after it joined WTO. Meanwhile, the high school curriculum proves to be too heavy, while university education still cannot meet the demand of the society,” Quyen said.

In the preparation for overseas studying, Tam Anh needs to obtain necessary certificates, including SAT, pre-SAT and TOEFL. She also has to fulfill the procedures for study registration through Internet, practice English and get familiar to the curriculums in the US.

According to Quyen, the countries in the world tend to create more favorable conditions for the students in their countries by offering scholarship programs and loosening the visa requirements.

Francisco Sanchez, the US Under Secretary of Commerce, in this working visit to Vietnam in 2011, said that the US plans to increase the number of Vietnamese students in the US by two folds within five years, in 2009-2014, emphasizing that education is one of the important cooperation fields between the US and Vietnam.

According to the US Embassy in Hanoi, the number of Vietnamese students in the US may reach 26,000 by 2014.

Who would go studying abroad?

Overseas study consultancy firms have affirmed that most of the candidates are from big urban areas. A mini survey on 100 students of the Vinh Phuc province’s high school for the gifted shows that only 2 percent of them have the intention to studying abroad, or plan to obtain scholarship after the first year at universities.

Meanwhile, a similar survey on 100 students from the three high schools in Hanoi shows that 90 percent of them plan to go studying abroad, of which 40 percent are sure that they would go studying abroad before the university entrance exams, while the others plan to seek scholarship during or after the university study. Most of the students have good learning capability and come from well-off families.

Professor Vu Thanh Tung, a high ranking official of the Hanoi University of Social Sciences and Humanity, believes that in the context of the globalization, the number of Vietnamese students studying abroad would keep rising steadily.

Tung said that the growing tendency is really a challenge to the domestic education. “It’s now the right time for us to answer the question what we should do to satisfy parents and students with domestic university education, and what we should do to change their mind that studying abroad is the only way to expand their knowledge,” he said.

Source: Tien phong

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