VietNamNet Bridge – It is obvious that the program on training 20,000 PhDs by 2020 would be very costly, which raises doubts about its feasibility.

The candidates must satisfy the requirements in specialties and foreign languages in order to be eligible for attending the entrance exams to PhD training courses.

According to Hong T, who has passed the exams to the Hanoi University of Education, one must have at least one or two scientific articles on their research fields published in newspapers.

“You can pay fees to newspapers to urge them to publish your articles soon, before the entrance exams take place,” she suggested.

According to Hong, there are many “doors” one has to go through to obtain the doctorate. After passing the exams, students would have to present their research themes and defend the themes. In many cases, the detailed draft is required.

After that, students would spend four years on their research works and follow the training. The average tuition is over VND10 million a year, but the tuition would be increasing year after year.

“The tuition for the first year is VND12 million, but it would be VND15 million for the second year. The tuitions alone would cost you VND80 million,” she said.

“However, the tuitions are just a small sum of the total money you will have to pay,” she added. “You should have VND200-300 million before you think of studying for a doctorate.”

It would be a miserably hard time for learners to write their dissertations. They would have to struggle themselves to look for materials for the dissertations, with no documents, no allocated expenses on scientific research and no financial support from the State. Students have to spend their own money on laboratories or surveys.

After finishing dissertations, students would enter another tough period – defending dissertations – which is very costly in time and money.

L, who has a successful dissertation, listed a lot of expense items needed for the dissertation defense: the money paid to the members of the dissertation marking council, the venue rents, the expenses on flowers, fruits and tea…

After successfully defending the dissertations at the local level, the PhD students would have to wait at least six months to be able to defend their dissertations at the national level.

They have to spend their own money to post the news on their dissertation defending on the well known newspapers, print at least 20 copies of dissertation summaries to deliver to specialists and obtain at least 12 feedbacks.

According to L, a PhD student would have to spend VND50 million or hundreds of millions of dong in private money.

Though it is very costly to train PhDs, the Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) still has decided that Vietnam needs to have 20,000 PhDs more by 2020. This means that it needs to produce 2,500 PhD every year.

This proves to be a very difficult task, if noting that in the years from 1976 to 2005, Vietnam could produce 8,400 PhDs only. Of the 8,400 dissertations, 30 percent is believed to have low quality.

Dat Viet