New model university project halted

Vietnam will not co-operate with any foreign governments to open more universities until at least 2020, according to a new decision by Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung, reports VietnamNet Bridge.

The prime minister requested a focus on developing the existing two national universities in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City into leading universities which will gradually reach regional and world standards. He also said the three existing universities in the New Model University Project, including the Vietnamese-German University, the Hanoi University of Science and Technology, and the Vietnam-Japan University, needed to be developed into world-class universities.

The Vietnamese government has been co-operating in constructing three international research universities under the New Model University Project in the country with the ambitious target of seeing them ranked in the top 200 universities in the world by 2020. They will be the first public universities in the country to hire foreign administrators, and in the initial stages 50-80% of the lecturers would be professors from abroad. The training of Vietnamese lecturers will allow the proportion of foreign lecturers to fall to 30% by the tenth year of operation.
Full report on the VietnamNet Bridge site