The National Assembly’s Committee for Culture, Education, Youth, Adolescents and Children recently held a workshop to review autonomy at higher education institutions in Vietnam.

The workshop highlighted key outcomes achieved by the twenty-three local universities who have been approved by the MOET to pilot autonomy since 2014, but also pointed out major challenges facing them when practising autonomy.

A significant issue highlighted was unsustainable finance models.  Funding cuts by the MOET and an inability to generate significant income through research has led to universities relying heavily on tuition fees, in particular at some medicine-specialised universities, where fees have increased substantially on previous years. 

Another challenge higlighted related to universities rights to recruit, pay and dismiss staff, which are all hampered due to contradictions caused by some legal provisions in relation to personnel management that universities still need to follow.

The third issue was a weak connection between universities and enterprises, resulting in many Vietnamese students graduating with a lack of knowledge and skills to meet requirements of employers.

Read further at:

https://vietnamnet.vn/en/society/autonomy-in-higher-education-in-vietnam...

https://vietnamnet.vn/en/society/universities-with-autonomy-lack-right-t...

https://vietnamnet.vn/en/society/enjoying-financial-autonomy-medical-sch...

Comments from Lien Ta, Senior Education Services Manager:

The workshop highlighted that there are existing gaps and challenges in the legal framework to ensure "full-autonomy" for Vietnamese universities. From a UK institution perspective this remains one of the barriers for the development of TNE activities in Vietnam. In particular, the development of joint-training programmes between local institutions and foreign ones in new training majors or at higher levels often requires a significant amount of financial autonomy which is currently still lacking. There may be opportunity for UK institutions to advise Vietnamese counterparts on how to ensure a sustainable finance mechanism and mobilise more funding and income from research activities to support the transformation process to becoming autonomous.