In mid-August 2019, the Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) organized an online conference to prepare for the new 2019-2020 academic year.

Dong Do University

Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc instructed MOET to submit a plan to shut down some low-quality education establishments, and examine and stop the education of low-quality training majors.

Phuc’s instruction shows Vietnam’s strong determination to restructure and rearrange higher education establishments in order to ensure high quality of training.

Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc instructed MOET to submit a plan to shut down some low-quality education establishments, and examine and stop the education of low-quality training majors.

“We cannot accept the low quality of university education that people often complain about. Students study at universities to obtain necessary knowledge that serves their future jobs, not just to obtain degrees to be granted by some low-quality schools,” he said.

Under the current University Education Law, universities have the right of self-determination in enrolling students. All students finishing high school are eligible to apply for study at universities.

However, the autonomy mechanism has raised big concerns about the quality of input students. Some universities, in an effort to find enough students, set very low required exam scores, which means that even students with bad exam results can also follow higher education.

VietnamPlus reported that a Hanoi-based university accepts students with just 12 score for three exam subjects, which means that they just need a 4 score for each exam subject to be able to study there.

Another big problem of universities is the lack of permanent lecturers. However, despite the lecturer shortage, schools still organize training, while ‘borrowing’ the names of lecturers from other schools.

Zing.vn discovered in the enrollment plan submitted by Huflit to MOET that many permanent lecturers listed by the school were also permanent lecturers of another school.

M.C.T, a permanent lecturer of Ly Tu Trong Technology Junior College, was listed as permanent lecturer in information technology of Huflit. T said he never gave a lecture at Huflit and could not understand why his name was found in the list of permanent lecturers of the school.

From January 2016 to May 2018, higher education accreditation was carried out in accordance with the old criteria (10 standards, 61 criteria). Nearly 54 percent of examined schools did not have enough lecturers to carry out training and scientific research.

In 2017, MOET made public the results of the evaluation of lecturers of higher education institutions, showing the high percentage of substandard lecturers at some schools. At least 64 percent of lecturers at Vo Truong Toan University did not have a master’s degree. The figures were 45 percent at Nguyen Tat Thanh University and 49 percent at Nam Dinh Nursing University.

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