Few concerns are of greater importance in Vietnam than education. It could be characterized as the unifying preoccupation of that country. Today, more personal and public resources are devoted to education than to almost any other comparable form of social activity; nearly every citizen has experienced schooling at some level. Education has been integral to Vietnam's history and remains central to its people's identity and aspirations for the future. For years, fierce debates have raged over the quality, accessibility, direction and management of education. The debates reveal dissatisfactions that are expressed more openly than perhaps in any other sector of society. However, all protagonists in Vietnam's perennial education debates are united by the passionate belief that education is critical to individual advancement and to the wellbeing of the nation.

The pressure on education to serve as a vehicle of individual and collective advancement is more acute than ever as the society becomes more complex and globally integrated. Major changes have occurred in the funding of education, and a host of reforms undertaken in curriculum design, examination procedures, teacher training, and educational administration. Private and foreign schools have entered the educational marketplace and the number of Vietnamese seeking education overseas continues to soar. Today Vietnamese people face unprecedented educational choices, but also substantial risks and costs. Do parents and students feel this is money well spent? Are their opinions being heard at policy levels? Is education meeting the needs of its diverse population and satisfying the expectations of its employers, civil service and social organizations? Can it be said that educational achievement is fostering social mobility in Vietnam?

The 2007 Vietnam Update was organized to respond to these questions. Held at the Australian National University, it was titled: “Education in Vietnam: Changes and Challenges”. The majority of the proposals submitted in response to the call for papers were from Vietnamese academics, reflecting the keen debate on education that is presently underway in Vietnam.

INTRODUCTION

The government of Vietnam emphasizes expanded investment in human capital to accelerate economic growth. This is appropriate in a country where sustaining rapid economic growth is the stated priority of the government. Human capital is widely seen as a key ingredient for growth, although in recent years the quality of schooling has emerged as at least as important as the quantity (for example, Hanushek 2008). In recent years, education policies have changed a great deal in Vietnam, as have the administrative and financial structures to support it. Upper secondary and higher education have expanded rapidly, while disparities in the provision and financing of primary and lower secondary education have probably increased across different segments of the population, despite official commitments to universalize access to basic education and make it more equal. The policy for many years has been to increase the fraction of government expenditure devoted to public education, and the target of 20 per cent was exceeded in 2008. However, and at the same time, education policies have increased the share of the cost of education borne by students, their families, and communities, a process somewhat ironically described as “socialization”.

This chapter examines economic aspects of education, but it is impossible to ignore other factors. It will start with a discussion of enrolment trends and three background issues that have implications for what happens in education: rapid demographic change and urbanization; rapid but geographically uneven economic growth; and the specifically Vietnamese constitutional, administrative, and political structures within which education exists. That is followed by sketches of trends arising from general government policies that impact on how education operates and the effects it has on peoples' lives. These involve changes in education financing, decentralization, deregulation, and governance. The chapter then turns to issues of education proper: access and imbalances; quality; actual and potential schisms and conflicts within the education sector and between different stakeholder groups; equity; and finally, whether or not the education sector is giving society and most groups within it good value for the huge resources it consumes.

This chapter explores impacts of globalization on higher education in Vietnam through a case study of Da Nang University (hereafter Da Nang University, or DU). Informed by literature on globalization and based on a survey of 240 DU academic and administrative staff, as well as indepth interviews, the study aims to clarify DU's responses to globalization and how globalization processes are affecting the university's lecturers', researchers', and administrators' attitudes towards, and understanding of, higher education. The analysis finds DU operating within two institutional responses to globalization; a top-down response that emanates from the central government authority; and a bottom-up response, which has developed within DU itself. Top-down responses to the globalization of higher education in Vietnam include the emergence of a new framework for the governance of higher education that promotes greater reliance on and responsiveness to market forces among universities and greater institutional autonomy, within certain limits. DU's own response to globalization has been characterized by efforts to improve the educational quality of the institution through a more commercial model of higher education that makes use of spin-off enterprises and specialized programmes oriented to the globalizing local economy.

This study focuses on only one university, but is suggestive of how universities and colleges across Vietnam are conducting their own reform and development plans, with varying degrees of autonomy from the Ministry of Education and Training (MOET). The analysis highlights some opportunities and risks pertaining to economic, cultural, and political processes underway at DU that are associated with globalization.

GLOBALIZATION OF HIGHER EDUCATION

Globalization may be defined as the intensification of social ties across borders. Globalization is surely not new, but it is undeniable that globalization has intensified in recent decades owing to political and economic reasons, as well as certain technological advances. Contemporary globalization can be understood as “market-led” to the extent that market institutions are driving global integration. On the other hand, “market-led” globalization has emerged within a specific and competitive interstate system — and is therefore political.

In January 2007 — following ten years of negotiations — Vietnam became the 150th member of the World Trade Organization (WTO). To further achievements made since 1986 and meet challenges imposed by current economic reforms such as the WTO accession, Vietnam does not only need “20,000 PhDs” as stated by the government, but it also needs a basic skilled labour force. As of 2008, roughly eighty per cent of Vietnam's workforce was unskilled. But skilling will be essential if Vietnam is to sustain the industrialization process and the quality of skilling in Vietnam will have wide-ranging effects on the quality of industrialization the country will experience. This chapter examines the evolution of the national skills development system in Vietnam and discusses some of the initial consequences of the WTO accession on skilling in Vietnam.

Although frequently overshadowed by discussions of higher education, the general issue of skills provision is nevertheless a crucial issue in the development and industrial strategy of any developing country. Education sector reform cannot omit attention to skills and the importance of skills development is stressed not only by educationists but also by many in Vietnam's industrial sector. As a recent United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) report on the Top 200 enterprises in Vietnam clearly demonstrates, large enterprises in Vietnam see the question of skills development as essential. The report states: “Without a large and sufficiently skilled workforce attempts to upgrade and achieve economies of scale would be fruitless” (Cheshier and Penrose 2007, p. 31).

Recent research by Dormeier-Freire and Vũ (2006) found problems affecting the skills development system (and the whole education and training sector) include poor quality of training, weak links to the labour market, inequalities of access across different regions and population segments, and corruption. Although political leaders have shown an increasing awareness of these problems, there remain large gaps between current skills development strategies and policies, on the one hand, and the needs of a modern economy and labour market on the other.

Welfare refers to human well-being and to the satisfaction of basic human needs. Welfare regimes are specific institutional arrangements governing the creation and allocation of welfare. Welfare regimes analysis is a body of political economy scholarship that seeks to explain the determinants and stratification effects of welfare regimes across different historical settings. A core assumption of welfare regimes analysis is that social class — and in particular political settlements among social classes — figure centrally in the determination and stratification effects of welfare regimes. This chapter extends the concepts and theoretical methods of welfare regimes analysis to an investigation of education and educational inequalities in Vietnam under Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV), which has ruled in the north of the country since the 1940s and on a countrywide basis since 1975.

Welfare regimes depend on more or less stable institutional arrangements and can rise and fall. But all welfare regimes are “causally specific” to the political and economic regimes that contain them (Esping-Andersen 1987, p. 7). Over the roughly sixty years of its rule, the CPV has presided over the development of two distinctive forms of political economy and, within them, two distinctive welfare regimes. Between the 1940s and the 1980s, Vietnam experienced the development and erosion of a state-socialist political economy — first in the north and then in the south — distinguished by its democratic-centralist modes of political integration and its redistributive modes of economic integration. Since the late 1980s, Vietnam has experienced the development of a market-Leninist political economy in which democratic-centralist modes of political integration exist in combination with market economic institutions (London 2009). As I demonstrate in this chapter, under these distinctive forms of political economy, Vietnam has experienced important changes in the principles and institutions governing welfare, education, and social and educational inequalities.

The chapter is organized in three sections and advances three related arguments. The first section summarizes core concerns, concepts, and theoretical suppositions of welfare regimes analysis.

This chapter concerns the private provision of education in Vietnam. Specifically, it examines the activities of private (people-founded) secondary schools in Hanoi as they strive to respond to and benefit from emerging market demand. People-founded schools refer to a particular type of “non-public” school permitted under Vietnam's law, while the term “marketoriented education” refers to education that operates under, and is responsive to, market rules — such as competition, price, and demand.

The chapter is in three sections. The first section discusses the liberalization of education that has accompanied Vietnam's transition from central planning to a “socialist-oriented market economy”. It reports trends in the private provision of education at various levels, critically examines “New Education” (a buzzword that I use to refer to education that simultaneously meets the requirements of the market economy while remaining faithful to socialist ideals), and considers the challenges various kinds of “private” or “non-public” schools in Vietnam face in light of international experience and theoretical literature on organizations and adaptation in market economies. The second section reports results from case studies of two private secondary schools in Hanoi and their efforts to adapt school operations to changing demand. The final section draws lessons from these and other schools' experiences and suggests ways private schools may improve their adaptability to Vietnam's growing market economy.

In only a short period, the scale of private education has increased dramatically. However, the experience of private education providers has been mixed. Overall, I argue that many school principals in Vietnam are responding to market demands with increasing sophistication. After only a few years of operation, principals of some schools have devised new management arrangements, achieved notable success in overcoming people's poor view of private schools, and increased their ability to recruit students as well as improve the quality of teaching. Some private schools have proven especially effective in responding to the challenges and opportunities internationalization and globalization present, particularly as this affects the content of curricular and extra-curricular activities.

Vietnam's higher education system was designed to generate and circulate knowledge under prescient central management. In practice, these arrangements produced poor results. In the face of urgent new challenges — such as economic globalization — the Vietnamese Government has decided (once again) to reform higher education. While the current round of higher education reform resembles previous reforms in some respects (such as calls for increased autonomy), other aspects of the reforms are novel and even promising. One such example is a Dutch-sponsored project on the development of professional higher education — the Vietnam– Netherlands project on Professionally Oriented Higher Education (PROFED, March 2005– March 2009). Commencing in 2005, eight universities were chosen to participate in this project which, in agreement with Ministry of Education and Training (MOET), provided the participating universities with increased managerial autonomy, so they could develop curriculum following competency-based principles.

Researchers at Hưng Yên University of Technical Teacher Education (HYU) — one of the eight universities chosen — used this opportunity to develop a curriculum responsive to the needs of regional employers. Specifically, researchers undertook a survey of employers in sixty-two representatively selected enterprises in the Red River delta, including interviews with nearly two hundred managers and engineers. Based on the data, graduate competency profiles were developed and used as the basis for development of two curricula for undergraduates majoring in Electrical Engineering and Information Technology. For these curricula to be implemented successfully at the university level, a new learner-centred pedagogy would also be required, as would a new learning environment. Unfortunately, the absence of such conditions at the university undermined the implementation of the new curricula.

The analysis suggests tremendous challenges remain in Vietnam's higher education system. If innovative programmes such as the Dutch programme are to yield results, higher education reforms will have to address outstanding rigidities and pathologies in the organizational management of higher education more effectively. Doing so will enhance the prospects for more innovative reforms and help improve the quality of graduates.

Based on a sociological survey and ethnographic field research conducted in 2005 in Đắk Nông Province, this chapter places education at the intersection of ethnicity and class in Vietnam's Central Highlands, a region that not only integrates with national and global markets, but also hosts intensified interaction between indigenous peoples and multi-ethnic migrants. Examination of two prime agents in education — teachers and parents — and their views of education and of one another — reveals that instead of being a site of cultural transmission or a meritocratic springboard for upward mobility, schools in this multi-ethnic setting reproduce existing structural inequalities among ethnic groups.

Following a brief introduction to Đắk Nông province and its education system, I detail the ways in which teachers and parents there perceive and talk about themselves and each other and the kinds of expectations parents have for their children. By identifying areas of convergence as well as disagreement among the concerns of and about teachers, I suggest that parents and educators are not communicating effectively and, in fact, are not engaged in a genuine dialogue. The missing dialogue between these two groups of education agents, I contend, stems from a more fundamental distance between indigenous residents and migrants that is in turn rooted in the recent history of the local political economy.

This chapter also links M'Nông's schooling outcomes with their social mobility, or lack thereof. As discussed by M'Nông parents and observed through ethnographic fieldwork, the paradox of centralized examinations and diploma-based recruiting policy of local enterprises is complicated by on-site ethnic tensions. I argue that the existing mode of education not only fails to transform interlocking ethnic class divisions, but breeds exclusion, as is seen in the failures of schools to produce M'Nông graduates to fill a wide range of jobs that are increasingly available in the fast industrializing local economy. The chapter shows how ethnic and class relations shape schooling outcomes and how education is a social field in which differences and inequalities are lived and felt.

INTRODUCTION

The twenty-first century presents the world with unprecedented challenges that could either threaten the survival of human societies as we know them or, if addressed in time, lay the foundations for sustainable societies on this planet for centuries to come.

What are these challenges? In this century, we will see the world's population grow from the current 6.7 billion to 9 billion (Chamie 2003). We will see crises in energy and water security, the catastrophic impacts of global warming, environmental degradation and species extinctions on a massive scale. We will see global economic integration of a kind never experienced before, with all its implications for growing interdependency and competitiveness between countries.

The challenges of the twenty-first century will affect all of humanity, and the solutions will have to be crafted at a global level. The solutions will need to draw on the skills and capacities of all sectors of societies. They will need to be based on sound evidence that is translated into effective responses. How do these challenges relate to Vietnam and to this chapter?

Vietnam will face these global challenges with its own unique set of circumstances. It has been transforming itself from a command economy to a market economy, and is now on a rapid growth path. It is changing from an insulated, to a gradually more globally integrated economy. But its geography and population distribution make it one of the most vulnerable countries in the world to the impacts of climate change.

For some time, developed countries have considered science, technology, and innovation (STI) as central to their strategies for addressing twenty-first century challenges. They have regarded increased collaboration between researchers and industry as fundamental for maximizing the application of research outcomes, and for ensuring that industry and broader societal needs can help to drive research.

In 2005, the Government of Vietnam issued Resolution 14, on Higher Education Reform, specifying the means by which the state would achieve a “fundamental and complete renovation” of higher education by 2020. The resolution emphasized the need for “renovating the thinking and system of higher education”, the “clarification of the roles and responsibilities of state administration” and also “the protection of the right to autonomy, increased social responsibility, and the transparency of tertiary education institutions”. The resolution set clear targets for the expansion of the higher education sector, and recognized the need for clearer boundaries between the respective roles and responsibilities of the state and universities.

This chapter examines the relationship between universities and the state in Vietnam's education policy since the introduction of đổi mới (renovation) in 1986. The first section deals with the decade immediately following the introduction of đổi mới, and examines how a variety of different experiments in areas such as the private funding of higher education, the restructuring of administrative responsibility, and changes to the curriculum, shaped the relationship between universities and the state. The following two sections examine the period from 1998 to the present. The second section highlights key changes to the legislative framework for higher education, while the third section examines in more depth the limits of autonomy for a private university and for the curriculum. They show that where the first decade of đổi mới in higher education was one of searching for an appropriate direction, the last decade has been one of consolidating and refining the existing direction. In the final analysis this chapter considers the extent to which Resolution 14 foreshadows greater autonomy for universities and whether sufficient attention is paid to the role of the faculties directly responsible for actual teaching and course delivery. It questions whether, in the light of past experience, Resolution 14 is likely to bring about the “fundamental and complete renovation” it promises.

Over the last two decades Vietnam has experienced profound changes in all manner of its social institutions. This volume of essays examines developments in the sphere of education. Broadly understood, education refers to social activities that impart knowledge, skills, or morality. Education can thus take place in innumerable guises and settings. The essays in this volume are focused on Vietnam's education system, understood as the entire set of processes and institutions that govern formal schooling, training, and research activities in Vietnam, and their social and educational outcomes.

The historical lineages of education in Vietnam stretch back over a thousand years. The country has had an organized education system for more than 500 years. Regional differences in education systems that emerged in (what is today) Vietnam in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the associated politics of education during this period are equally if not more important for understanding education in contemporary Vietnam. In macrohistorical terms, major influences on education in Vietnam include the development and incomplete decay of Confucian institutions, colonialism and anti-colonial struggle, post-colonial state formation, twentieth century wars, the development and subsequent erosion of state-socialist institutions and, most recently, the development of a state-dominated market economy within a Leninist political framework. Against such a varied and complex historical backdrop, the last two decades is a small bit of time indeed. And yet, changes in Vietnam's education since the late 1980s have been momentous, both reflecting and effecting broader social change.

The publication of this volume comes at a time when Vietnam's education system is at a crossroads. Rapid economic growth over two decades has permitted unprecedented increases in the scale and scope of formal schooling. And yet there is a prevailing sense that Vietnam's current education system is inadequate to the country's needs. These are not abstract concerns. Education is not a stand alone sector but a major institution that functions and develops interdependently with other major institutions. What happens in Vietnam's education system has broad implications for social life in the country.

INTRODUCTION

After more than twenty years of Đổi Mới (renovation) which commenced in 1986, Vietnam has made remarkable achievements both socially and economically. Since 1991, Vietnam's annual GDP growth has averaged over seven per cent. Education and training have also undergone positive changes and the people's general knowledge has increased substantially. By the year 2000, the state had carried out literacy programmes and established “universal” (phổ cập) primary education (UPE) in all localities. (According to state standards, a province/city to be considered reaching UPE has more than 80 per cent of children in the area finishing Grade five by age fourteen. In the mountainous or difficult areas this rate is set at 70 per cent). By December of 2008, forty-seven out of sixty-three provinces and cities had universal enrolment in lowersecondary education (ULSE). The government is now planning UPE and ULSE for all pupils reaching the requisite age for those particular levels of education, in addition to implementing universal upper-secondary education (UUSE) in some localities. Vietnam also plans to complete universal lower- secondary education (USE) for all provinces and cities in 2010. However, ensuring the sustainability of UPE and USE remains a big challenge for Vietnamese education as the phenomenon of dropouts remains.

To help clarify the magnitude of dropouts, this chapter analyses dropout trends of Vietnamese pupils from 1998 to 2006, using the Vietnam Living Standards Survey (VNLSS) data. The analysis focuses on primary and lower secondary levels of schooling, since universalizing education and retaining universal education at these two levels are stated goals of the Vietnamese Government. The analysis also attempts to analyse dropouts across regions, expenditure groups, sex, and age. Finally, the analysis examines reasons children drop out of school. A technical appendix provides details of the statistical methods employed in this analysis.

SCHOOL DROPOUT RATES FROM 1990 TO 2008: GENERAL TRENDS

It is important to emphasize that the term dropouts in Vietnam refers to students who cease attending school during the school year.