VietNamNet Bridge –  The HCM City Economics University said last week that two textbooks by foreign authors will be used in the school’s high-quality training program.

The two books, written by Professor N. Gregory Mankiw, are published by Cengage Learning House in Vietnam.

At the press conference Dr Nguyen Trong Hoai, vice president of the university, said that his students would be exposed to textbooks and syllabi used by prestigious schools such as Yale, Harvard, Princeton and Columbia in the US.

Hoai said the decision would lead to a breakthrough in national education, and analysts commented that the move shows the strong determination of Vietnamese educators to reform higher education.

More and more universities are making independent decisions about enrollment and curricula. The heads of the schools believe that if they continue pursuing the old curricula, Vietnamese education will never integrate well with the rest of the world.

The schools, which have been impatient waiting for the Ministry of Education and Training’s guidance on how to reform education, have been trying to design new syllabi themselves.

Training programs under different names have also been established, including a high-quality training program, an education center of excellence and a training program for talented students.

The common characteristic of the programs is that they are specifically designed for highly capable students who wish to learn from international standard curricula. Thus, they are called “elite training programs”.

An educator said the use of foreign syllabi by universities was a growing trend.

This could be seen as a model of “internationalizing education” at Vietnamese schools, he said.

Vietnamese students at these schools will have more opportunities to seek scholarships from famous universities, join international research projects and find jobs in international groups.

Luong Duy Anh, a representative of Cengage Learning in Vietnam, said the textbooks would be printed in Singapore to ensure copyright protection and printing quality.

However, in the future, the books will be printed and distributed in Vietnam once the publishing house can find reliable Vietnamese partners.

Chi Mai