Whenever the Ministry of Education and Training or schools propose increasing tuition, they face fierce opposition from the public. But educators assert that with low costs, higher education cannot achieve the desired quality.

The story about higher education tuition and quality has been raised once again as experts discuss the solutions to improve workforce quality to reach the goals set by the Politburo’s Resolution No 57 on breakthroughs in science, technology, innovation and national digital transformation.

"Everyone understands the saying ‘A hungry belly has no ears’. Without sufficient funding for higher education, or with low costs, it’s very difficult to achieve the desired quality," said Le Truong Tung, president of FPT University.

Tung pointed out that Vietnam’s current university tuition is among the lowest in the world. If higher education is viewed as a service, Vietnam is offering a very low-cost service that cannot be exported. For many countries, higher education ranks among the top five export sectors.

Therefore, when planning higher education development, it is necessary to mention the resources for higher education development, and one of the most important factors is the average cost to train one student.

This cost should come from multiple sources, not just tuition. Vietnam needs to compare the cost of training a student domestically with that of other countries in the region.

"How high should this figure be in the next 5-10 years? What solutions are there to reach that target? What is the percentage will students and the state contribute? And, crucially, what will the credit mechanism look like?" Tung said..

He commented that the financial model for students has not received adequate attention but it can help solve the problem related to training cost.

According to Tung, student credit means leveraging future resources to invest in the present. Students would repay loans with money they earn later, essentially borrowing from their future to fund the present.

"I believe that most students will do well in the future and be able to handle this. However, student credit in Vietnam is currently very limited—both in scale and amount—compared to other countries," he noted.

The investment cost to train a student must be addressed through credit, which must follow the state’s regulations. Meanwhile, universities can only offer certain policies like scholarships or "study now, pay later" programs.

"At FPT University, we’re doing this because the state hasn’t fully addressed it yet. We hope the government will tackle this issue systematically," Tung said.

Additionally, he urged Vietnamese parents to change their mindset about investing in higher education. A significant proportion of parents don’t prioritize expenses on education, influenced by a long-standing belief that schooling is free or that tuition is merely ‘symbolic’.

In contrast, in many countries, parents often start saving for an education fund as soon as their child is born to ensure access to better schools later, even though those countries have robust credit systems.

"So, what’s expensive, and what’s cheap? In many countries, average tuition is compared to average salaries—with the principle that the income from one-year work covers two years of tuition,” Tung said. 

“This means that for a four-year training course for a bachelor’s degree, it takes two years of work to repay the loan. That’s the tuition structure in Australia and the US. Of course, for schools with higher investments or quality, tuition may be higher," he explained.

Chu Duc Trinh, Rector of the University of Technology, a member school of the Vietnam National University, Hanoi, noted that globally, there are two ways to calculate average tuition. The first is as Tung described; the second is setting tuition at 50 percent of GDP per capita at the time of study.

Vietnam’s current GDP per capita is nearly $5,000. With that formula, annual tuition would be around $2,500.

"If this cost is entirely placed on students, it’s very burdensome. We hope the government will increase investments in universities in the coming years, especially in infrastructure and equipment for experiments,” he said. 

“Private schools have more advantages, while public schools like ours face difficulties, so the state needs to have policies in place to tackle the problem, instead of leaving students to shoulder everything,” he said. “Autonomy doesn’t mean being fully self-reliant in all aspects, but it’s autonomy within certain conditions."

Thanh Hung