VietNamNet Bridge – The handwriting is on the wall for the death of vocational schools in Vietnam. Increasingly, Vietnamese students who fail their university entrance exams have shown a preference for repeating the exams in ensuing years, or taking manual jobs, than attending vocational schools.

What are vocational schools doing?

Da Nang-based Hoang Dieu Vocational School has kicked off the new enrollment season.

Nguyen Ngoc Thanh, headmaster of the school, complained that there are very few students enrolling, though the school always spends heavily on marketing. It regularly organizes meetings with students at which the school’s officers give career advice.

The school also sends its staff to rural and remote areas to provide information to local students. Most notably, the school offers specific preferences, including tuition remissions and scholarships, in an effort to attract more students.

“We were planning to receive 1,000 students for accountancy, business administration, and restaurant management majors, but we succeeded in finding only 300,” lamented Thanh.

The students most targeted by vocational schools are those who fail the university entrance exams. However, Thanh said he does not expect too many to apply this year, because students would rather enter universities than vocational schools. This is especially the case once the new enrollment mechanism keeps the universities’ doors widely open to high school graduates.

The same complaint has been aired by the other vocational schools, including Viet Tien Technology and Business School, Duc Tri Schools. “Students will flock to universities, while intermediate vocational schools (2-year training schools) will ‘sit idle’,” a teacher of a school in Da Nang City said.

The teacher went on to say that, these days, vocational schools not only have to compete with each other, but also with universities in their scramble for learners. Meanwhile, recent years have seen a continuous rise in the number of universities in Vietnam, many of which are people-founded schools.

Nguyen Van Dung, Head of the Continuation Education Division of the Da Nang City Education and Training Department, confirmed that a series of vocational schools in the city are “at the point of death”. The 4-story headquarters of the Duc Minh Economics and Technology School, for example, has been seen locked.

Nguyen Ngoc Anh, Head of the school’s Training Division, has confirmed that there is now only one class running. Students of the class, having entering the school in 2011, are now in their internship period. Meanwhile, the school has stopped enrolling students over the last two years due to a lack of applicants.

Mien Trung Economics and Technology School looks deserted. Enrollment was suspended in 2013, when the school received only a handful of registrations for study.

Also, according to Dung, the Viet-A Technique School has ceased operation, while many others have halted enrollment. The schools’ managers still don’t know what they should do to survive in the current climate.

Vocational schools are a last resort

A report of the Ministry of Labor, War Invalids and Social Affairs showed that only 5-10 percent of Vietnamese students completing secondary or higher education go on to vocational schools every year.

Vietnam has 1 million high school graduates every year. Of these, 10 percent goes on to vocational schools, while 80 percent takes university entrance exams.

Going to vocational school has become the last resort for Vietnamese students.

Tien Phong