VietNamNet Bridge - Some experts believe that universities do not have enough students because there are too many universities and the number of high school graduates is decreasing. 

This year’s enrollment season was unprecedented: universities, including the most prestigious ones, have had to struggle to look for students.

Schools have blamed this on the enrollment mechanism set by the Ministry of Education and Training which allows students to register to study at more than one school. As a result, students make registration but they never turn up.

However, some experts pointed out that the enrollment mechanism must not be something to blame, affirming that the problem lies in the unreasonable development of the university network.

There are too many universities in Vietnam. The ‘university boom’ is attributed to the fact that both educators and licensing bodies do not have long term vision to see the changes in the society.

Some experts believe that universities do not have enough students because there are too many universities and the number of high school graduates is decreasing.

As the national economy develops strongly because of the industrialization and modernization, the Vietnamese literacy level will improve considerably, while the percentage of women to join the labor market will increase. 

This will result in the decrease in the fertility rate, and therefore, the number of students will also be decreasing. This means that the number of students to call for universities will also be decreasing.

Official reports of the Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) showed the gradual decrease in the number of high-schools students. In the 2007-2008 academic year, Vietnam had 3,070,023 high school students, while the figure reduced to 2,951,889 in the next year and to 2,675,320 in 2012-2013.

Meanwhile, with the living standards improved, urbanites now tend to send their children to universities overseas instead of domestic schools. And there are fewer students planning to continue studying at university after finishing high school because of the increasingly high unemployment rate of the workers with bachelor’s degree.

“It is foreseeable that the number of seats at universities will be higher than the number of high-school graduates,” an analyst commented.

Merging universities?

A lot of experts have called on to restructure the network of universities and merge the schools if necessary to create bigger and stronger.

In 2013, the Wales Government decided to merge universities to reduce the number of schools there to 6-7 (there are now 11 universities). The merger helped its university education ‘stronger despite fewer schools’.

Taiwan in 2012 also decided to merge 6 universities to have three because of the decreased fertility rate in the territory, which led to the small number of students at the universities (there were the schools with less than 10,000 students). 

Experts believe that Vietnam can follow the move focus on improving the training quality rather than on increasing the ratio of number of students on 10,000 people. 

Chi Mai