Ho Chi Minh City universities have witnessed a decreasing number of applicants for French majors during the last few years due to poor job prospects after graduation.
The University of Social Sciences and Humanities has recently said applications to the Department of French Linguistics and Literature (DFLL) slumped 40 percent in the past four years.

A handful of students went to an exhibition organized in November at the school to provide information on study in France, a school lecturer sighs.

The Ho Chi Minh City University of Pedagogy (HCMUP) says it has had to fiercely wrestle to find students for the French language faculty in recent years.

Some schools now run classes with very few students while others even stop enrollment.

“The situation would be even worse than that,” DFLL Dean Nguyen Hoang Trung foretells.

“Few job opportunities are driving students out of the major,” Long Nguyen, a student, says.

Most employers, in fact, give high priority to candidates who can speak English when they are recruiting.

“This is true even for French companies,” Trung complains. “I met many who said they only employed those fluent in English.”

French language graduates will normally find it a lot harder to land a good job than majors in English, Japanese or Korean, says Minh Ngoc, a French language graduate of the Ho Chi Minh City University of Foreign Languages and Information Technology.

“My friends and I were unemployed for a few months before getting a job with a modest salary.”

English is a favorite in almost all aspects in Vietnam.

Tuoitre