VN educator responds to US experts’ assessment of higher education

16:17' 18/06/2007 (GMT+7)

Doctor Nguyen Duc Nghia VietNamNet Bridge – Doctor Nguyen Duc Nghia, Vice President of HCM City National University, talked about the US-based Vietnam Education Fund’s recent report of the 5 problematic areas it observes in Vietnam’s university education. Experts carrying out the Observations on University Education project say that our current university curricula are made up of too many subjects and undergraduate students need to complete more than 200 credits in order to graduate, and in general, our programmes require too much from students but provide them with too few options. What do you think? These observations are both accurate and inaccurate, since study loads wouldn’t be too great if our current 45-minute class periods were converted into 60-minute ones. But it is indeed essential to curtail our programmes. As for the suggestion that we deliver more optional courses, this will help to make our curricula more interesting and flexible. But courses with less than 5 students will be difficult to open for financial reasons. According to the report, it is difficult for students to change their majors. Why is this so? This observation is completely accurate. At the moment, different departments within a university recruit their own students and each department has its own admission grade. Many universities require students to follow their original majors throughout their undergraduate years and few allow students to change their majors. On the contrary, in foreign countries, it takes students only 5 minutes to complete paperwork to change their majors. The fundamental reason is that our universities aren’t capable of recruiting all those who want to pursue university education. If students were freely allowed to change their majors, this might lead to the phenomenon that students would apply for an uncompetitive department in order to be accepted into college and later move into a different department. The observers say we lack capable lecturers with updated professional knowledge. Do you feel “hurt” by this assessment? It’s difficult for our lecturers to improve their own knowledge and capacity due to work loads that are too heavy. Thus, we’ll need to develop a teaching salary mechanism in which our instructors will be able to invest time in research and professional improvement. What about another interesting observation that says the habit of universities’ recruiting their own graduates to teach prevents an active research environment from developing? It’s good if those graduates are indeed better than their own professors. But it’s also true that instructors who have experiences in working in business, management and other social activities outside the school environment can make lectures more interesting. As for the suggestion of increasing the number of universities while our teaching resources are still limited, is there any solution? At present, only 25% of those of college age are able to go to college; there aren’t enough seats for the remaining 75%. So it’s necessary to have more universities. We’ve also set the goal of having 600 universities by 2020. This means that every month, we’ll establish 2 more universities. Considering our lack of instructors, we’ll have to engage in an intense socialisation process which allows foreigners to invest in education, helping to increase the numbers of schools as well as teaching staffs rapidly. Only by doing so can we hope to break up our university circle. (Source: NLD)