VietNamNet Bridge – Tran Hong Quan, Chair of the Non-state Universities’ Association, in late June said that the Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) still did not give the final answer to the association’s proposal on allowing non-state owned schools to apply their specific enrolment plans.

Mr. Tran Hong Quan.

This means that non-state owned schools would not be able to take initiative in their enrolment plants as expected, while they would still depend on the results of the national university entrance exams held in early July.

Non-state owned schools have many times complained that they cannot enroll students because of the currently applied unreasonable policies set up by the Ministry of Education and Training.

The ministry decided that only those students, who get the marks from the national university entrance exams equal to or higher than the floor marks to be announced by the ministry, would be eligible for applying for studying at universities, including people founded schools.

As a result, according to Quan, over the last three years, people founded schools can only find very few students for the university training. This is really a big waste of the society’s investments, because a lot of schools with good material facilities and teaching staff have not been used up their resources.

Since people founded schools cannot find enough students, they have to shut down many training majors. The abundance of classrooms and teachers and the lack of students have made schools incur big losses.

“A lot of people founded schools are now in the danger of getting dissolved,” Quan warned, saying that the currently applied enrolment mechanism is “unrealistic.”

Under the current regulations, non-state owned schools have to enroll at least 200 students every year and they must have the stable enrolment situation in the three consecutive years in order to be able to continue providing training.

If referring to the regulations, the Tan Tao University, one of the nest invested schools in Vietnam, is now in the danger of getting dissolved. The school covers an area of 100 hectares with good material facilities and it has good teaching staff. However, the school can only attract tens of students every year because of its disadvantageous position..

The problem is that the sources of students for people founded schools to enroll get exhausted. The number of students who get the floor marks or higher to meet the requirements set by the education ministry is not high enough for both the state owned and non-state owned schools to enroll.

While many educators believe that Vietnam does not need non-state owned school system, which is thought to provide low training quality, Quan insists on the necessity of the existence of people founded schools in Vietnam.

Quan said that people founded schools have been existing in many countries in the world with advanced education. In South Korea, for example, 67 percent of students go to non-state owned schools. Meanwhile, the figure is over 50 percent in Malaysia. The majority of the best schools in the US are private run schools.

He emphasized that in order to develop the university education, Vietnam needs to expand the non-state education system. It’s now the right time to push up the socialization of education, because the state budget would no longer feed the university education.

Lao Dong