“This is a misconception. Vietnam now runs a market economy and you must not expect  the number of university graduates to be exactly equal to the number of workers ordered like in a centralized economy,” said Tran Phuong, rector of the Hanoi Business and Technology University.

Dinh Ngoc Hien, president of Thanh Tay University, also said that one must not blame the educational system for the high unemployment rate.

He said ‘worker abundance and job deficiency’ should be explained by the fact that Vietnam’s economy does not create enough jobs for university graduates. 

The investors target the low labor cost in Vietnam, so there are not enough jobs for workers with high education level.

The chair of the Vietnam Association of Universities and Junior Colleges Tran Hong Quan denied that most of the redundant 200,000 school graduates are from non-state owned schools, which are believed to have lower quality.

Educators argue that it is unreasonable to blame the education sector for the high number of unemployed university graduates.

According to Phuong, many students choose majors just by their feelings, and do not consider labor market demand. They have to follow other majors and experience other training courses.

Many others, after finishing school, want to stay and work in large cities and refuse to return to home villages. Therefore, they stay jobless, or go to localities where they are needed.

As for the students who cannot find jobs because of their low capability, will have to undergo retraining.

“This is quite a normal thing in a market economy,” Phuong commented, adding that redundant university graduates can be seen in all economies.

In China, 7 million university graduates were found unemployed in 2011.

Quan disagrees with the view that it is necessary to scale down university education in order to reduce the number of unemployed bachelor’s degree graduates.

“We have to be consistent with the plan to develop university education and we should not narrow the training scale,” he said.

“We need to prepare the labor force not only for now, but also for the future, for modernization and industrialization, especially when the 4.0 industrial revolution is coming,” Quan said.

Taiwan and South Korea had to develop university education for 20-30 years before they become industrialized economies.

Phuong believes that one of the problems is the high proportion of students registering to study at pedagogical schools and the low proportion of students following technical majors.

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Tran Phuong, rector of the Hanoi Business and Technology University.

Tran Phuong, rector of the Hanoi Business and Technology University.