Number of schools climbing, but quality sliding: conference

From 1998 to 2008, 208 new universities and colleges were established, the same number of schools that were established in the 50 years before that, the Ministry of Education and Training (MoET)’s Higher Education Department reported at a conference Saturday.

Statistics showed that 19 universities were set up in 2006 and 20 universities were set up last year, while three new colleges were set up each month over the two-year period.

Out of the 208 newly-established universities and colleges, 48 are private.

However, most of the new schools have failed to make good on their investment commitments, ignoring pledges to build infrastructure, facilities and employ qualified teachers, said Tran Thi Ha, head of the MoET Higher Education Department.

Former head of the MoET Personnel Department Le Van Hoc said that before their openings, many new schools had drafted development plans through 2020, allocating hundreds of billions of dong in investment for future improvements.

But Hoc, who is responsible for assessing and approving new school projects, said after three to four years, most of the new schools had implemented none of the strategies laid out at their establishment.

The greatest shortcoming of newly-established schools, especially private ones, said Ha, is the low quality and insufficient numbers of teachers.

“The proportion of teachers with doctorates and master’s degrees [at new private schools] is very low compared to the country’s existing public schools,” she said.

Educational inspectors recently discovered that many private schools have falsified the number of doctorate and master’s degree holders they employed.

Ho Chi Minh City’s Van Xuan College of Technology reported it had 20 doctorate holders and 105 master’s degree holders, but inspectors found out it had only one doctorate holder and six master’s holders.

Gia Dinh Information Technology University in HCMC has seven teaching departments but only one doctorate holder on its permanent teaching staff.

Phu Xuan Private University in the central province of Thua Thien-Hue has 12 faculty departments with only three doctorate holders on staff.

Stricter criteria

To overcome such shortcomings, the Higher Education Department has proposed a punishment framework for schools that fail to meet quality requirements after three-five years of operation.

Deputy Minister of Education and Training Banh Tien Long said that by 2010, schools unable to improve their infrastructure and facilities would be suspended from admitting students and could even have their license revoked.

The schools must plan to have 25-30 percent of their teachers attending doctorate courses every year, according to Long.

“The ministry will consider these plans as one of the criteria in deciding how many students will be allowed to attend each school,” he said.

“Teachers are the key force of education,” Minister of Education and Training Nguyen Thien Nhan said.

“So, schools have to attract good teachers and then ask them, or even require them, to study for doctorates.”

“The requirements of establishing a university and college must be stricter,” Nhan said.

He said local agencies must ensure that schools are only established in areas where they are zoned to do so.

New universities and colleges should be built in new urban areas and specifically-zoned university areas, not in downtown urban areas, in order to guarantee that new schools have enough space to operate effectively, he said.

Tran Thu Ha, a representative from Ba Ria–Vung Tau University, proposed that the MoET ensure that local authorities are committed to local education development.

She said local administrations must support schools, especially by granting them adequate land.

To convince the public of the strength of a Vietnamese education, Nhan said, both the quantity and the quality of local schools must be increased, said Nhan.

Tuition, IT

The MoET held several conferences on the different aspects of education throughout the country last week.

The MoET project “Change the Financial Mechanism of Vietnam’s

Education and Training 2008-2012” has been approved by the government, Nhan told a conference last Wednesday.

The project is now waiting for the approval of the Communist Party Politburo.

Once the project is implemented, scholarship and financial aid programs would be paid for by the government through the Department of Labor, Invalids and Social Affairs, instead of by schools themselves.

New tuition policies laid out by the project would be applied in the second semester of the 2008-2009 academic year.

However, the project stipulates that tuition fees would increase gradually through at least 2012, as many schools complain that tuition revenues do not provide them with the funds they need, said Nhan.

The minister said that one goal of the project is to make public and private school tuitions nearly the same by 2020.

Another conference on Friday focused on the application of information technology (IT) in education.

Information technology is applied in several mountainous and disadvantaged provinces, said Quach Tuan Ngoc, head of the MoET Information Technology Bureau.

But due to a lack of funds and MoET supervision, many schools have been unable to apply effective IT systems.

Nhan said Wednesday that along with financial and tuition reform, IT application would be at the top of the ministry’s priority list as it strives to develop the country’s higher education sector.

Source: TN, Agencies