VietNamNet Bridge - Vietnam’s intellectual standard has unexpectedly become a hot topic of discussion on education forums.

Intellectual standard is understood as the awareness level, or the average cultural understanding of a community or a group of residents, i.e., the common education level of society.

Many Vietnamese scholars believe that the low Vietnamese intellectual standard is the reason behind of a lot of the country’s problems.

“Dropping litter everywhere, using bad language and stealing public property must not be seen as behavior of people with high intellectual standards,” a reader commented.

Meanwhile, other argue that no one can say if the Vietnamese intellectual standard is low when farmers who have few opportunities for higher education can create important inventions.

High or low?

In September 2013, the Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) created an action plan to implement the Vietnamese Youth Development Strategy in 2011-2020, under which 95 percent of Vietnamese youth attend secondary school and 80 percent of the youth have higher education or equivalent level. 

The ratio of university students in 2013 per every 10,000 people is expected to be 256. Meanwhile, in 2003, Vietnam only had 768,000 students, or 118 students per every 10,000 people. 

Regarding education level, Vietnam has been universalizing primary education while it is implementing the general secondary education.

A report showed that 99.12 percent of people aged 15-60 were literate by 2014, which included 99.12 percent of people aged 15-35 and 97.34 percent aged 36-60.

In the years from 1976 to 2014, Vietnam granted the professorship title to 11,097 educators and scientists, including 1,628 professors and 9,464 associate professors.

Vietnam has over 100,000 master’s and over 24,000 PhDs.

According to MOET, in the 2013-2014 academic year, Vietnam had 214 junior colleges with 600,000 students, and 214 universities with 1.46 million students. The country had 92,000 university lecturers, of whom 4,155 had professorship title.

Vietnam has 400,000 university and junior college graduates every year.

Regarding the Human Development Index (HDI), Vietnam ranked 121st among 187 countries in 2014. HDI shows the average income, the literacy ratio, lifespan and some other factors. 

The Vietnamese HDI has increased by 41 percent over the last two decades. In 2012, Vietnam ranked 127th among 187 countries in HDI.

HDI is calculated based on three criteria – health, which is measured by the average life expectancy; knowledge, which is measured by the percentage of literate people and education levels; and living standard measured by GDP per capita.

CV