At present, only 4% of higher education institutions have at least 75% of lecturers holding a doctoral degree.

Under Project 89 on "Improving the capacity of lecturers and managers of higher education institutions to meet the requirements of fundamental and comprehensive renovation of education and training in the period of 2019-2030", higher education institutions will have autonomy in selecting and sending lecturers for training, as well in fund management and monitoring of the training process to post-training use, and reimbursement of training costs, if necessary.

In addition, training institutions will have autonomy in enrollment and training organization (with 3% to be trained at home) on the principle of sharing funds between the state and training institutions.

The training will be conducted in flexible forms such as full-time training in Vietnam; full-time training abroad; and full-time training in the form of coordination between a Vietnamese and a foreign training institution (only for doctoral level).

In 2021, 164 institutions sent 1,277 lecturers for doctoral training, funded by the State budget, in all three forms above. In 2022, 155 institutions selected 1,308 lecturers for training under this project.

According to the Ministry of Education and Training, to realize the goals of Project 89, Vietnamese higher education will need to train about 7,300 lecturers with doctoral degrees and more than 300 lecturers in culture, art, physical training and sports majors with a master's degree in the next 10 years.

As of 2019, Vietnam had 73,312 lecturers, including nearly 21,000 lecturers with a doctoral degree (accounting for more than 28%). By 2020, about 30% of university lecturers had doctoral degrees. This number increased to 31.12% by 2021.

At present, only 4% of higher education institutions have at least 75% of lecturers holding a doctoral degree, while 9% of higher education institutions have 50-75% of lecturers holding a doctoral degree. Most universities have 10 - 50% of lecturers holding a doctoral degree. The rest have under 10% of lecturers with doctorate degrees.

Thuy Nga

PhD production plan: Will Project 89 go a new way?

Before launching Project 89 that aimed to produce 7,300 more lecturers with a doctoral degree, the Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) ran two projects on preparing human resources with doctoral and master’s degrees, worth trillions of VND.

Proj