(Tuoi tre Newspaper Interview, June 19, 2010)

Interviewee: Dr. Pham Thi Ly, Hoa Sen University

Reporter: Minh Giang

Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) interferes deeply in administrative work of all the Vietnamese higher education institutions. Universities and colleges are under strictly control of the MOET, however MOET are not able to control the quality of higher education in reality.  It is necessary re-considering the school lisencing procedures as well as quality assurrance in existing universities. However the essential matter is to create an appropriate mechanism for promoting schools get into right track and achieve the excellence.  Quality assurance should be delegated to the independent accreditation bodies. Transitioning from state control to supervision should take place.

These are Dr. Pham Thi Ly comments on the developing of the current higher education system in Vietnam. Dr. Ly, who has been studied on the education issues in more than 10 years, observes that, there are three remarkable phenomenons recently. First,  the expand of the system reveals in number of institutions and number of enrollments. This is obviously and a normal phenomenon in the tendency of moving from elite toward mass education that had been happening around the world. The number of students increased 13-folds since 1990.  Despite this growth in student enrollment, since 1987 the number of instructors has only increased by a factor of three. The student/faculty ratio grew from 6 in 1990 to 13 in 1995 and 29 in 2000. In 2009 the student/faculty ratio remained at 28 and currently 34 students per lecturer in some institutions. Diluting quality is inevitable and this caused great concerns in society.

Second, the participation of the foreign and private sector in higher education.  In 1987, there were 101 universities and colleges, all of which were public. By September 2009 there were 412 universities and colleges, of which over twenty percent were “non public”.  Alliance programs with foreign partners has been blossoming more than ever before. This situation raises the questions of the relation between the state and market, the commercialization of higher education and public interest, the role of private sector in education development.

Third, the phenomenon of establishing provincial university in every province of the country, and most of two-years colleges has been upgraded to university status. This raises the questions of the strategic master plan of the tertiatery education and the capacity of the system to meet the need of economic development. If almost colleges upgrades to university status, the system will fall into mission drift: who will produce skilled labor in middle-level for economic development?

Establishing New Universities in “Asking-Giving” Framework

It is said that there are “beneficial group” in blossoming of higher education institutions. In your opinion, who most benefits in such development?

Commercialization of higher education is a widespread phenomenon in recent practices, and not only in private sector. Privatization and commercialization is not necessary connected.  When state-own universities chasing “non-standard” programs which is known as low admission requirement, less strict of training and assessment process, high ratio of student/instructor and questionable training quality (in some institutions, the number of student in such programs is over 50% of the total student enrollment), that is commercialization.  Who benefits most in this situation? First, those are people who hold the right of giving in “asking-giving” framework. Second, those are people who use education services as a trading business, in the background of limited information and options for users.

“Asking-giving” framework leads to easily establishing new university while dealing with violations seems quite cursory. Should we dissolve the very weak institutions to assure quality of education?

India closed hundreds of poor quality institutions in 2005. However there is no precedent for such an action in Viet Nam. In general it could happen but there were no specific regulations for dissolving procedures, in term of what level of violation should be. Violation penalty has little impact to the schools compared with their financial benefit.  Closing the very weak institutions is necessary, however, more importantly the policies that encourages schools in the right track of achieving excellence. Strengthen civil society supervision by independent accreditation agencies should be better than delegating the right of quality control to a state agency. Such mechanism of power easily leads to “asking-giving” framework which causes trouble of corruptions.

Poisoned Food: Better Not to Eat

New universities are blossoming while infrastructure, facilities, faculty, etc do not meet the minimum requirements. Is it feasible calling for improving quality in such conditions? Is the development aims to expand the scale of training to 200 students per 10,000 people by 2010 and 450 by 2020? 

In deed, Vietnamese enrollment today is still low compared to other nations. It enrolled about 2 percent of the age group in 1990 and reached 16% in 2005, while China serves 19 percent, Malaysia 32 percent, Thailand  43 percent at the same period, and in the United State of America and Canada, the ratio is over 50 percent. Many countries reached the ratio of 40 percent today while Vietnam ‘s ratio is still 19 percent in 2009. Therefore, Vietnam should have more institutions. It is said that better to let blossoming alone to provide education for most population, do not concern on quality too much because poor quality of education is still better than no education. In other words, we need to fill in our empty stomach before thinking of delicious food. I do not agree. Better not to eat poisoned food.

It is pointed out that per student pending is still low and it impacts poor quality of higher education, is that correct?

Compared to the developed countries, tuition fees in Vietnam are still low in corespondent to average income of population. However it is still considerable amount towards most of Vietnamese families. Public spending on education inncreased from 8% in 1990 to 15% in 2000, 30% in 2008, standing in middle up to high level among countries in the region. It is exclusive the great amount of investment for studying abroad.  With such an investment from the state and families, Vietnamese students deserve to a much better quality of education compared to what they have received. The consequent of diluting quality recently due to not only expansion of the system, but also the lack of appropriate policies for achieving excellence in education and strengthening accountability and hinder unhealthy activities.  If there is no financial resource, then it is hard to talk about the quality, but lacking financial resource is not the unique reason, even not the most important reason, of weaknesses and poor quality. With recent investment on education, we could still do better than what we have at the present.

In other countries where is similar to Vietnam’s situation, what does their development look like? And how do they solve the problems?

We can learn great deal from the neighbors, because what we are facing is also what they have been resolved. Chinese has been focusing on the apex of the system. Nine universities are considered “Chinese League” are heavily invested to become “world-class universities”. However, more importantly, as Prof. Altbach observes, Chinese has expanded non-degree system which is similar to the community colleges in the United State of America.  The number of tertiary vocational-technical colleges has grown far faster than universities, increasing more than tenfold between 1997 and 2005. There have emerged more locally determined programs aimed to retrain laborers and increase the quantity of skilled labor, provide more access to those are not suitable for university academic training and need education at a middle level.

In 1984, the first private university was esteblished in Turkey. Since then there were 29 more to be created.  Each private university is established by an act of Parliament after a rigorous approval process, involving a detailed proposal their academic agendas and financial capacities and assets.[1] They are subject to annual financial and academic audits by the Council on Higher Education, as well as required to offer a certain percentage of students scholarships. Beyond these requirements, private universities are autonomous in organizing their management and finances.

The role of MOET should be supervision only

In the context of Vietnamese higher education today, what should we do, in your opinion, to expand the system concurrently with improving quality?

When market becomes a major force, the inevitable question is the role of the state: how to determine the role of the government so that it can work effectively with the institutions. Malaysia’s experience shows that how institutions become incapable under government’ interference.  In Vietnam, MOET interferes deeply in administrative work at individual school while it is not able to control the quality. For instance, delegating enrollment quotas discourages institution in promoting linkages between school and industry, because the cooperations to determine industry’s needs and necessary skills required, will lead to nowhere when quotas are not approved or curriculum is not validated.

Therefore, many countries moved from state control to state supervision framework.  State’s responsibilities mostly are creating policies and assure their implementation. Instead of state control, professional associations and independent accrediation agencies should have more significant role in quality assurance. Turkey’s experience shows the importance of international accrediation is effective tool for benchmarking and improving institutional performance. “Three Disclosures” is a right step of moving forward and need to be followed by a transperant information system which will be providing accrediation results and performance of all the institutions. MOET ‘s requirement on publishing learning outcomes is correct. However, learning outcomes have limited implications when it was produced by the schools themselves without discussion with industry/businesses.  The employers and society are eligible for validating, assessting, or rejecting the values or implications of the learning outcomes, curriculum and training quality of the schools. Lesson learned from Chinese is the stratified higher education system to meet the diversified needs of society, because if we do not increase access for population, it is hard to justify the mountain of money invested to a handful of elite “world-class universities”.

The increasing participation of the private sector is necessity, and the government has foreseen and planned for this tendency. In the context of mass education, public spending is not able to meet the need of education development, participation of the private sector is seen a necessary solution to provide skill workforce for the economy. There will be a day, society would be saturated with the counterfeit or poor quality products the state/private universities are producing now, and would require a real quality of education.  Hence the private institutions can contribute positively because at that time quality training will be their vital question. Turkey’ experiences show that how the right policies would help to stimulating private sector in education development.

However, there will be areas that private sectors can not replace the state. Research on basic, natural sciences and humanities and social sciences, most urgent among them are education sciences and public policies, plays an extremely important role to the future of country. Private universities, with very few exceptional,  will not please to shouder the cost, and if any, they are not capable anyway. Without the state investment, these fields are hardly well developed and their weaknesses costs a great deal to the country.

Thank you

Minh Giảng

[1] Overview and Legal Basis of Private Higher Education in Turkey, MIZIKACI , 2008

http://www.albany.edu/dept/eaps/prophe/data/Country_Law/Context_Turkey_PHE.doc.