Professor Dr. NGUYEN VAN TAI
University of Social Sciences and Humanities
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

INTRODUCTION

Today human beings are entering a new era - the information era with the powerful development of knowledge economy. It can be seen from the realities of many countries in the world that the knowledge has become a giant power, the dominant resource bringing wealth, prosperity to different countries in the world. This simultaneously shows that such traditional resources as natural resources, labor resource or a huge market no longer play an extremely important role in the national socio-economic development as previously. Additionally, the other tendencies are undergoing and becoming prevalent, those are processes of internationalization and globalization. They create a power of continuing strength and acceleration that attracts many nations and many peoples.

In such circumstances, it is easily perceived that the competition between more developed countries (MDCs) with less developed countries (LDCs) will only be detrimental to the latter group. Among many causes resulting in the detriment to the LDCs mentioned above, unprogressive education and training, particularly at higher education level, is the most significant cause.

Vietnam, presently, is one of the LDCs in South East Asian region. Entering the new millennium and realizing its low position in the world, Vietnamese government is trying to boost the processes of industrialization and modernization in the hope that Vietnam will become an industrialized country by 2020. This is a big challenge for Vietnamese people. It's also a challenge of great importance for the development of science and technology as well as the development of education and training to provide skilled labor resource and, therefore, meets the national demands of economic growth and social development. In general, improving the quality of higher education and training in this period should be considered as the key factor in the process of renovation and promotion of industrialization and modernization helping Vietnam easily integrate with other nations in the region and in the world.

EDUCATION REFORM - AN URGENT NEED OF VIETNAM SOCIO-ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

1. Socio-economic context :

Vietnam has operated Renovation and Open-door policy for over 15 years (1986-2001). In this period the country has achieved a lot of great success in different significant fields, such as : high economic growth (on average, 7-8% per year), the improvement of living standard, the enhancement of social and cultural life of people, the stabilization of politics, the expansion of international relations, and a better position in the world arena. Nevertheless, practically, compared with other countries in the Asian - Pacific Rim, Vietnam is obviously still backward and the economic development copes with many difficulties. Furthermore, amongst a lot of country drawbacks the education system is still encountering many insufficiencies : low quality of teaching and learning, poor equipment and facilities, backward teaching methods, insufficient textbooks, lecturer shortage, unreasonable distribution of university network etc. Certainly, the national education system will not meet the demand of high quality and skilled labor resource for pushing the process of industrialization and modernization in the next 15-20 years.

Furthermore, the XXIst century begins with such distinguishable features as the explosion of information, vigorous development of sciences, techniques and technology. The experiences of MDCs in the world nowadays show that for urging country development they need to expand the high technology as information technology (IT), biotechnology, new material technology, technology of automation, etc. And, naturally, they entail a labor resource of good knowledge and high skill. Besides, the other great important thing of the world shows that human beings should pay more attention to the problems of sustainable socio-economic development in order to successfully protect the achievements that have gained during the past XXth century.

The above analysis indicates the very important role of education, especially the higher education, in providing labor force which equipped good knowledge, creativity, initiative, high ability in scientific and technological affairs as well as in communication.

2. Education Reform - A National Policy in Vietnam :

Vietnam is the nation which has a long history in South East Asian region. During the feudal time, the Vietnamese education was seriously influenced by Chinese from teaching methods, forms of examination to the content of learning. The Four Books (Analects, Mencius, the Great learning, the Doctrine of the Mean) and the Five Classics (the Book of Songs, the Book of Documents, the Book of Rites, the Book of Change and Spring and Autumn Annals) were considered as the educational foundation.

In the end of XIXth the French colonialist invaded Vietnam, Vietnamese national education system was radically changed. Chinese language and Sino-Vietnamese (Han-Nom) language were eradicated and replaced by French and Latinized Vietnamese (Quoc ngu). The French colonialist established an education system consisting of elementary, high schools, colleges, and universities. However, most schools were built in urban areas such as Hanoi, Hue, Saigon, and in some other cities. The amount of Vietnamese people going to school was very limited at that time because the education system in the French Colonialism aimed to train a certain number of people who would later serve French domination in colonial coutries.

On September 2nd 1945, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam came into existence. The educational system established in French time changed to a new one. However, after only a short period of time, French colonialist reoccupied Vietnam. Wars broke out again. French did not totally withdraw from Vietnam until the Victory of Dien Bien Phu in 1954. And then, America got involved. The Geneva Agreement was signed in 1954 and the country was divided into two parts : North and South Vietnam which had two different political systems.

The South Vietnam was liberated and the whole country reunified in 1975. Vietnamese education system was reformed and adopted the model of Socialism countries (especially the model of Soviet Union). In the field of higher education, a lot of professional universities were established and kept under the control of different ministries (or ministerial-sized departments) depending on the training majors like Ministry of Higher Education and Vocational Training, Ministry of Teacher's Traning, Ministry of Agriculture, Ministry of Health, Ministry of Trade, General Department of Geology, etc.

In the early 1980s, when East European Socialism collapsed, the Vietnamese government decided to transfer the country socio-economic system from rigidly planned structure to free market- socialism oriented mechanism via the Open-door policy (1986). This alternation accordingly caused a lot of social changes including education.. Generally, education should be reformed in many aspects to meet the requirements of country development.

3. Education Reform and Its Achievements:

Since 1986, owing to the politico - economic renovation, the Vietnamese education system has carried out some significant reforms as follows:

• Enforcing Education Law of Socialist Republic of Vietnam (1998) in which education is considered as primary national policy. Simultaneously, national budget has invested increasingly in education : in 1995 the investment made up 8.0-10.0% total national budget, in 2000 the rate was 15.0% and it is estimated to rise 18.5% by 2005 and 20.0% by 2010.
• Renewing the training procedures and diversifying forms of universities. Higher education procedures extend over 4 years and divided into two stages: in stage I, students are provided with general knowledge during 3-4 semesters; and stage II lasts the rest 4-5 semesters and mainly provided with professional knowledge.The present education reform, generally, focuses on larger background. Regarding to diversification of university, due to the national policy of educational socialization, beside public universities and colleges Vietnamese government encourages to build more private-, people-funded universities, even joint-venture / completely foreign-funded universities. For example, the Australian university RMIT (100% Australian investment) was built in Ho Chi Minh City and will start its first academic year (2001-2002) very soon. Additionally, there are also some other foreign universities projects awaiting to be approved in the near future.
• Innovating the objectives and vision. Higher education nowadays aims at providing labor resource not only for the public sector as it did previously but also for the growth of collective-, individual-, private-, state-owned capitalism-, and foreign-invested sectors. Furthermore, another objective of Vietnamese higher education reform is to promote functions of research and community service. University graduates are presently equipped good ability of creative, independent research and problem-solving… in their lives.
• Renewing curricula, foundations and teaching methods in order to establish a good connection as well as interactions between theories and practices in society, to update technological scientific knowledge, to improve the quality of training in Vietnamese universities to be compatible with other international one. Meanwhile, teaching methods are constantly modified from monologues to dialogues. Moreover, the student-centered approach, educational technology with the help of machines and equipments are now being applied in various universities and colleges . As the result, the educational quality is far better than previously. Credit system is applied successfully at many universities, students are able to organize their learning schedules more favorable.
• Renovating university models, setting up a university network, reasonably distributing universities and colleges on regions. Vietnamese universities are presently being built and reorganized into inter- and multi-disciplinary universities. Their objectives are to provide larger foundation and to create good linkages among universities so that they could transfer curricula each other. Furthermore, through the form of inter- and multi-disciplinary universities they could effectively share facilities, information resources, teaching staff, etc. Besides, at present Vietnam university network consists of 190 universities and colleges, in which there are 92 universities, 98 colleges. They could be categorized as follows :

  + National university plays a nucleus role in training and supplying skilled manpower for the whole country. Nowadays, there are two Vietnam National Universities (VNU) in Hanoi and in Ho Chi Minh City.

  + Regional universities plays an important role in a large geographical region. There are 4 regional universities which are allocated in Thai Nguyen, Hue, Da Nang, and Tay Bac (came into operation in 5/2001). In the future more regional universities will be fairly distributed throughout the country.

  + Professional universities are state-funded universities, leaded directly by various ministries / ministerial-sized departments. For instance, Medical-Pharmaceutical University, University of Hydraulics, University of Sports and Physical Education, University of Construction, University of Culture and Arts, University of Communication and Transportation etc, are under the management of respective ministries: Ministry of Health, Ministry of Hydraulics, General Department of Sports and Physical Education, Ministry of Construction, Ministry of Culture and Information, Ministry of Communication and Transport, etc. All of these universities scatter in different regions of Vietnam.

  + Open universities are composed of one in Hanoi and another in Ho Chi Minh City. The Open university in Hanoi is a public institution while in Ho Chi Minh City is a semi-public one.

  + People-funded universities / private universities consisting 17 universities are chiefly locating in urban areas like Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Hai Phong, Da Nang, Thanh Hoa, Dong Nai, Binh Duong, Vinh Long…

  + Community colleges are mainly state-funded and built in different provinces of the country such as in Ha Tay, Hai Phong, Ba Ria - Vung Tau, Tien Giang, Dong Thap…

CONTINUING HIGHER EDUCATION REFORM
FOR FUTURE DEVELOPMENT

The achievements gained during the last higher education reform are one of the significant factors strengthening the socio-economic development in Vietnam. Education level of Vietnamese people now is higher than in the past, the number of university graduates increases, and therefore social productivity annually rises, etc. All of these achievements help boost high growth rate of economics. In the other hand, Practically, Human Development Index (HDI) of Vietnamese people increases at a higher speed than that of other countries of the same economic situation. Generally speaking, Vietnamese people's lives are improved in every aspect.

However, in comparison with other countries in the SEA region, it is obvious that there exists a big gap of socio-economic development between Vietnam and other countries. Vietnam should accelerate the growth rate in many fields including higher education if it wishes to keep up with other nations in a near future. Higher education in Vietnam is confronting with many difficulties and challenges. In other words, higher education should be further renovated to assert the country position under the influence of internationalization and globalization.

Continuing higher education reform in Vietnam could be analyzed as follows:

1. Designing suitable strategies and policies for higher education development.

The development of Vietnamese higher education is not completely stable and, definitely, and of course, it does not meet the demands of providing high quality labor resources for the promotion of country industrialization and modernization as well as socio-economic development. The experiences during the past several years indicate that the university network fluctuates continuously. For example, Vietnam National University- Ho Chi Minh City (VNU-HCMC) was restructured after 5 years in operation, and now it almost stays in the starting point again. In the previous time, there were 10 university members in the scale of VNU-HCMC, but next , it decreased to 9 (University of General Studies was eradicated) and then it went down to 8 (University of Teacher's Training was separated). And presently, according to the Government Decree No 07/2001/CP and the Decision No 15/2001/Q?.TTg, the VNU-HCMC now consists of only 3 university member (University of Natural Sciences, University of Social Sciences & Humanities, University of Technology), one research institute (Institute of Environment) and one faculty (faculty of Economics). Nowadays, we are living in the era of information explosion with great progress of science and technology. It is compulsory for us to grasp and solve problems timely so that to grow living level for people in many aspects. Meanwhile, however, Vietnamese higher education is still confused with its model, structure, and scale of universities. This does not enable Vietnam to keep pace with the world progress. Hence, Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) should take into account and design strategies, policies to develop higher education in a scientific and reasonable way. The strategies should be closely linked with the requirements of Vietnam socio-economic development in every short-term (5 years) as well as long-term periods (10 - 20 years). Besides, the strategies also focus on constructing universities into centers of high quality manpower supply for the nation development.

2. Restructuring training systems and professional components.

Presently, the structure of university education and vocational training are heavy imbalance. The situation "more engineers - less workers" becomes more popular in society and has an increasing tendency. Generally, there is a reality that the training scale of vocational schools is many times smaller than that of universities. An average size of vocational school is 400 - 500 pupils whereas a university has approximately 5,000 students. As the result, Vietnam gets into a very difficult situation, that is, a big shortage of skilled workers but a great surplus of university graduates. Moreover, training structure illustrated in pyramid shape is turned upside down. In addition, the imbalance structure could be also seen in the majors of training. For the field of vocational training, students of Economics - Tourism reach 29.6%, Pedagogy 20.1%, Medicine - Physical education 15.0%, while students of Technology account for only 6.9% and Agriculture - Forestry - Fishing only 12.4% (it should be noted that Vietnam is a fundamentally agricultural country). At college and university level, students of Economics - Law take up to 42.78%, Pedagogy - Foreign language 19.31%, Science 15.53%, Agriculture - Forestry - Fishing accounts for 3.13%, Medicine - Pharmacy - Physical education 2.75%… The above figures indicate that in order to industrialize, modernize and grow the economy, Vietnamese higher education must radically renovate its education-training system.

3.Concentrating on improvement and assurement the quality training.

In this period, the Knowledge economy trends to dominate in different areas in the world. It able to say which country well manupulates knowledge that can develop quickly and be prosperous. This means the great contribution of high quality education and training. In present situation of Vietnamese education, the concentration on improving and ensuring the quality of higher education is an important and urgent issue. The country reality shows that the teaching staff ie the key factor of quality training enhancement in universities. We are confronting with circumstance of lack of lecturer in quantity and also poor in quality. The average ratio of leturers over the students in many universities (including the University of Technology) is 1/50, this number may even goes up to 1/70 or more, while the average ratio in the world is around 1/20. This shows explicitly the teaching staff at universities now are in serious shortage and cannot ensure the training quality. Furthermore, the greatest concern is that the number of high qualified lecturers such as professors, associate professors, doctors, masters, only accounts for 10.0% of the total lecturers at universities and colleges. This is a real alarming situation for the development of Vietnamese higher education in the forthcoming period. Vietnamese government, particularly the MOET, should realize this is a critical and need to strictly construct a plan for training and refreshing faculty members through means of short- or long-term training courses in the country or overseas, etc. Competent lecturers are one of the key factors in higher education quality assessment and quality assurement . Hopefully, only by this way, Vietnamese universities can be compatible with internetional universities.

4. Reasonably developing the national network of higher education.

The distribution of universities and colleges in Vietnam is still unreasonable. Almost all the universities and colleges are mainly concentrated in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City and in other urban areas while many other geographical regions rarely have any universities, colleges or vocational schools. For instance, 190 universities, colleges (in the academic year 1998-1999) are geographically allotted as follows: North West region : 2; North East : 19; Red River Delta : 30; Central Coast : 16; Central Highlands : 4; South East : 11; Mekong Delta : 10. Nevertheless, there are up to 52 universities and colleges in Hanoi aand 34 in Ho Chi Minh City. In 2001, MOET has just established the University of North West and the University of Vinh.. These are the most recent regional universities in the Vietnamese university network. But practically, in the other geographical regions are still in serious shortage of universitites in order to supply skilled labor resource serving the process of regional socio-economic development. An illustration of this is Mekong Delta. With the population of above 17 million, it is the most important agricultural region in Vietnam. However, currently, there are merely 3 universities including 2 public (Can Tho University and An Giang University) and one people-funded university in Vinh Long. Another example is Central Highlands. Despite its primary role in growing industrial plants but here has only 2 public universities (Dalat University and Taynguyen University). Nowadays, theVietnamese Prime Minister has approved the project "Planning a network of Vietnamese universities and colleges to the year 2020" (April 2001). This is a master plan for Vietnamese higher education. Nonetheless, the road ahead for higher education is filled with difficulties and it depends greatly on the future socio-economic development of the country.

5. Continuing teaching method renovation and applying progressive education technology.

During the past time Vietnamese higher education has achieved some success in renovating teaching methods. However, the realities reveal that teaching method in universities are still big problem and should be constantly improved, which could only be done effectively with the assistance and synchronous development of many other parts, such as librarian system, information and communication, intranet, internet, etc. Generally, the following teaching methods should be applied more comprehensively at universities: seminar, discussion, brainstorming, problem solving, case study, simulation... Teaching methods will also be renovated via student-centered approach which will promote students' activeness, creativity, competence in self-study and life-long study. It should be obvious that the above-mentioned renovations cannot be implemented without advanced technology in teaching - learning by means of modern facilities and equipment, particularly computer and internet network.

6. Readjusting and improving training quality at people-funded universities and colleges.

With the economic growth, the number of Vietnamese university students quickly increases. In order to satisfy the learning demands, to diversify forms of universities, to socialize education, the Vietnamese Government has to approve of the opening of many people-funded colleges and universities along with public ones for increasing people's educational level and training high skilled manpower. In the academic year 2000-2001, the total number of students of 17 people-funded universities and colleges throughout Vietnam goes up to 80,000, in which 70% students major in Business Administration, Computer Science and English. However, in reality, the training quality does not meet the required standard due to the shortage of teaching staff, classrooms, facilities, equipment, books, magazines, etc. Training curricula of many universities mainly focus on teaching theory, but not on practicing or doing research, and even some classes have from 100 to 300 students. As well as that, people-funded universities select training branches that do not need much investment in infrastructure, nor in facilities like foreign language, business administration, law etc. All of the weaknesses aggravate the heavy imbalance in training structure of Vietnamese higher education. Consequently, readjusting and improving the training quality of people-funded universities and colleges has become a necessity and needs to be put into effect.

CONCLUSION

From the experiences of More Developed Countries (MDCs) and Newly Industrialized Countries (NICs) in the world, in order to increase the economic growth rate, to improve efficiently physical and spiritual lives of the people, education and training plays the most crucial role. More importantly, in current period when human beings are entering the XXIst century with the great advance in Knowledge economy, education, especially higher education, plays a part in training and generating knowledge - a leading force in bringing prosperity and affluence to human beings.

Vietnamese higher education has undergone many different historical, up and down periods. Nowadays, to enable Vietnam to integrate with other countries in South East Asian region and in the world, it is extremely crucial to reform higher education in order to improve the quality of training, of human resource, and to implement governmental policies in the process of country industrialization and modernization. Beside the achievements gained during the past few years, Vietnamese higher education should be further reformed. The reform content could be over and above what is mentioned in this report. It should be carried out more intensively and extensively in various forms : increasing financial investment for education, encouraging research activities and experimentation, expanding and enhancing international relations in education, heightening autonomy and responsibility of universities, etc. All of them are a very difficult problem that Vietnamese higher education necessarily strives to solve, to move forward, and to be entitled the center of knowledge training and of high-qualified manpower training for Vietnam, a prosperous country in the forthcoming years./.

REFERENCES

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