Pham Tat Thang, deputy chair of the committee, told the local press that there are still problems in the autonomy implementation, and that there is disagreement in the understanding about the concept.

Under the University Education Law, university autonomy covers personnel, apparatus, assets, financial issues and disciplines. 

The autonomy in organization, governance, training and scientific research has not been mentioned.

To date, only 23 state-owned schools have been implementing the autonomy mechanism in a pilot program. All the schools are 100 self-funded, i.e. they run with money they can earn and don’t receive subsidies from the state.

According to Thang, granting autonomy only to self-funding schools is not a reasonable policy.

The majority of the 23 schools are establishments which provide training in economics, social sciences & humanities and technology. These are considered ‘fashionable’ training majors which attract high numbers of students, while the schools don’t have to spend too much money on machines and laboratories. 

Meanwhile, other training majors, such as basic sciences or pedagogical schools, cannot attract students. The schools won’t be able to get autonomy if they have to be self-funded.

At present, besides the 23 self-funded schools, the state and ministries, as the governing bodies, still have to provide money to maintain their operation, based on the numbers of students.

Nguyen Trong Hoai, Rector of the HCM City Economics University, commented that while in other countries, universities have many different sources of income, Vietnamese schools have relied on tuition.

He cited a report as saying that 70 percent of source of revenue of schools is from tuition and school fees. 

According to Thai Ba Can, Rector of the Hong Bang University in HCM City, the expenses for each student in Vietnam is low compared with other Asian countries. 

The average spending on every student was VND9.24 million in 2009 and VND16.2 million in 2017. Meanwhile, in other countries, each student consumes VND70-100 million for each year of study.

“The state’s investment in the education sector needs to be raised to 0.7-1.5 percent of GDP per capita per year,” Can said.

In related news, the HCM City National University and Hanoi National University have been listed in QS Ranking 2019. The former is in the group of schools ranked in the 701st to 750th category, while the latter was in the 801st-1,000th group.

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Mai Thanh