July-23-2008
By Huong Le
ThanhNien News.com

International analysts have praised Vietnam’s moves toward establishing international-standard universities, but experts say bad management has brought about an “educational crisis” in the country.

During Prime Minister Phan Van Khai’s roundtable discussion on higher education as part of his US trip in 2005, a panelist told him that for the cost of a single Boeing 777, Vietnam could be well on its way to renovating its higher education system.

“Vietnam, compared with other countries in the region, spends a lot of money on higher education,” said Ben Wilkinson, a representative of Harvard University’s Vietnam Program in Ho Chi Minh City.

“I would argue that money is not even the decisive factor [in establishing a world-class university.]”

In merely two decades, and with only slightly more than US$50 million to start with, the University of Chicago has transformed itself to one of the world’s top institutions, said Wilkinson as an example.

This past May, the government authorized the establishment of four universities aiming to meet international standards in Hanoi, Can Tho City, the central region (either Hue or Da Nang) and Ho Chi Minh City – with a $400 million loan from the World Bank and the Asia Development Bank.

Driven by a shortage of skilled workers, the initiative is part of the country’s bigger effort to globalize its education.

It has been on the agenda of almost every official visit between American and Vietnamese government leaders.

But the question remains whether the country is capable of producing a world-class university while foreign education experts often criticize Vietnam’s education system as over-emphasizing theory over practical knowledge.

According to a World Bank report released in 2006, Vietnam devoted about 4.3 percent of its GDP in 2004 to education.

About 2 percent of the country’s population completed 13 years of education or more, the report said, while only about 10 percent of Vietnamese aged 20-24 attended university.

The report also showed the lack of university-based research at Vietnamese universities and an absence of innovation.

In 2006, the number of scientific publications generated by Vietnam National University was only 34 compared to more than 4,500 at Seoul National University, 3,600 at the National University of Singapore and nearly 2,200 at Tokyo University.

During the National Conference on Improving Higher Education Quality held earlier this year, Deputy Minister of Education and Training Banh Tien Long emphasized that not a single Vietnamese university was mentioned in any top-500 major university ranking system.

The Ministry has since announced that it aims to have a few Vietnamese universities ranked in the world’s top 200 by 2020.

“The country is certainly in a higher education crisis,” said Vu Thi Phuong Anh, deputy director of Vietnam National University (HCMC)’s Center for Educational Testing and Quality Assessment.

“Our education system has been diagnosed with ‘fall achievement disease.’ Cheating has plagued both our students and teachers.”

“Fall achievement disease” refers to schools and teachers who think it’s more important for their students to pass classes or get good grades than to actually learn.