Under a newly released government’s decree, higher education establishments will be classified into three groups, depending on whether the schools are oriented toward research, application, or practice. They will also be ranked in class 1, class 2 and class 3 based on their achievements.

However, it is difficult to say if one school is research, application or practice oriented because most of the schools, except medical, pharmaceutical and arts, are multi-disciplinary.

More and more schools have been established recently, while existing schools have opened more training majors. In 2015 alone, 177 schools registered to open 447 new training majors. Schools have tried to expand their network so as to attract more students.

An analyst noted that all schools would proclaim themselves as ‘research oriented schools’, even though their budgeting on scientific research is modest. 

Universities now have similar training majors and training modes – full time, in-service and long-distance training. And most of them try to providing training for master’s degrees and doctorates, though they have to ‘borrow’ lecturers from other schools.

It is even more difficult to rank universities because no school would declare they belong to class 3.

There has been no official report about the university ranking. MOET’s Deputy Minister Bui Van Ga noted that the positions of schools can be reflected in the number of students who applied and the required minimum exam marks students must have. 

The schools which have higher competition ratios are believed to be the more prestigious schools.

However, educators pointed out that the ranking based on students’ thoughts must not exist any longer because it has caused an imbalance in human resource development and waste of time and society’s resources. 

They said there must be specific criteria for schools and the society to refer to when classifying and ranking schools, so that students can make reasonable choices.

Nguyen Kim Phuc, acting director of MOET’s University Education Department, noted that what schools are interested now is how the classification and ranking would affect the state budget allocation and the determination of tuition. In other words, they want to know how much money they would get every year from the state budget to maintain training.

Nguyen Van Khanh, president of the Hanoi University of Social Sciences, noted that the state wants schools to be classified so that it can lay down reasonable specific investment policies for every group of schools.

“It would be unreasonable to make the same investment in all the schools,” he explained.

Thanh Mai