Rush to plug Vietnam's learning gap
In downtown Ho ChiMinh City - otherwise known as Saigon - stands a colonial-era villa with
Moorish windows and a turret, where a multinational oil company's executives and later asenior
Communist official once lodged.
Today, the mansion houses Vietnam's hope for the future: an independent campus of Australia's
Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. It is communist Vietnam's first wholly foreign-owned
university, where around 400 students are studying language and technical skills to help them
thrive in the global market.
Knowledge at this small but idyllic satellite of Australia's "working man's college" does not come
cheap. Tuition fees range from $1,200 (E 1,215, £787) for a 10-week, 200-hour English course to
$8,460 for a software engineering degree course - not insignificant in a city where annual per
capital GDP is estimated at just $1,400 a year.
Yet the hefty tuition is not expected to constrain the institution's growth. Within two years, RMIT
Vietnam - with the backing of the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank's International
Finance Corporation - plans to open a brand new full-sized university campus with an initial
capacity for 5,000 full-time students, and more room to grow further.
"In Vietnam, because of the strong belief that an education - particularly a Western education - is
a guaranteed ticket to a good job, people are willing to fork out that money," said Nguyen Huu Le,
a software company owner and a member of RMIT Vietnam's board.
For Vietnam's communist rulers, the recent opening of RMIT Vietnam after nearly five years of
preparation is the "great leap forward" in their efforts to expand the country's overburdened
higher education system by encouraging private and foreign investment.
Currently, an estimated 1.5m high school graduates compete in gruelling national entrance exams
for less than 250,000 coveted places at state-run universities. Those selected for admission are
rewarded with dilapidated, overcrowded facilities, poorly paid professors, and outdated
curricula that bear little relevance to modern workplace skills.
While Hanoi - which aspires to a "knowledge-based economy" - is boosting its education
spending, the funds are largely directed towards primary and lower secondary education in rural
areas, rather than higher education.
Yet most Vietnamese families are more than willing to spend what money they have on
education and training for their children. So the government has given its blessing to a
burgeoning education market, which has seen private players - both domestic and foreign -
jumping to fill gaps left by the state system.
"People here feel there is so much to learn and if they can learn it and apply it, they can leave
countries like Thailand behind," said Khalid Muhmood, general director of Apollo Education &
Training, which earned nearly $1m in revenues from its English courses and corporate training
last year.
Both Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City are already flush with private language schools that offer
night-time and weekend classes of varying quality and costs to learners, including small
shopkeepers, police officers, taxi drivers and the children of well-placed government officials.
At the technical end, Indian software companies NIIT and APTECH, which specialise in training
computer programmers, have set up centres to generate manpower for the country's fledgling
programming industry.
Local players are also jumping into the fray. Saigon Tech, an institute started by a local
economics professor and an overseas Vietnamese software developer with the backing of the
Houston Community College, opened its doors last year and now has 180 students on its
five-semester course, which costs $4,000.
"There's a huge number of potential students who cannot get a place in the university," says
state university lecturer Nguyen Thi Anh Thu, one of Saigon Tech's founding partners. "But if the
government can push businesses to do education, we will have a generation of skilled workers."
Hanoi is attempting to do just that. To woo more foreigners to set up what they delicately refer to
as "people-founded universities", the government offers generous incentives - taxing foreign
education ventures at just 10 per cent, compared with rates of 30 to 40 per cent for other
sectors.
Now however, Hanoi faces a new challenge: upgrading its ability to regulate the growing private
education sector to ensure students get a decent education in exchange for their hefty fees.
"Authorities have already started to have a real concern that things are out of control," said Mai
Thi Thanh, an education expert at the World Bank. "But finding ways to ensure the quality of
these non-public universities while you are not funding them is not an easy task."
By Amy Kazmin - The Financial times - July 02, 2002.
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