University leaders to be given more autonomy in new law

University leaders in Vietnam will have more freedom to set institutional policy in areas such as student enrolments, curriculum development and senior management under a revised law set to go into effect later this year. The law marks the latest in the government's ongoing efforts to overhaul its higher education system.

A hoped-for outcome is that a higher education system infused with greater autonomy will create a more locally responsive and globally competitive workforce as Vietnam continues its decades-long transition from a centrally planned economy toward one that better meets the demands of a market economy.

"The highest objective is to make Vietnamese universities be on par with their foreign peers," Nguyen Thi Kim Phung, director general of the Department of Tertiary Education, Ministry of Education and Training, told the newspaper Kinh Te Do Thi (Economic and Urban Affairs) in December.

While the changes emphasise the “right of a higher education institution to determine its own objectives and select a way to implement its objectives”, the Communist Party-led government remains a central figure in key decisions, a carry-over of the Soviet-style approach in which the university operates as a state agency under the control of the government.

Approved by Vietnam's National Assembly in November, the new law amends and supplements a 2012 higher education law, which paved the way for greater institutional autonomy in Vietnam's universities but offered few details on how to achieve it. It shifts more decision-making authority to institutions, while also assigning them greater responsibility for mobilising funding and complying with accountability measures. It also supports the expansion of private higher education.

The 2018 document lays out the role and responsibilities of university councils, a relatively new concept in Vietnam but similar to Western principles of trusteeship, and charges them with managing the resources for the institutions over which they preside and holding their senior management accountable.

The revised law grants private university councils the power to appoint the rector and other senior positions, but the government retains that authority for public universities.

Left untouched from the 2012 law is a provision requiring that Communist Party committees be established and operate within every higher education institution, including private ones. Moreover, university councils must include Party representatives, while key decisions are still subject to state approval.

Institutions can offer new courses and disciplines, but a longstanding curriculum devoted to political ideology remains compulsory and will continue to be managed by the Ministry of Education and Training.

Vietnam's Ministry of Education and Training is now drafting decrees on how to implement the revisions, set to go into effect on 1 July, Phung said.

'Vibrant but unsettling'

The new law inspired lively debates at ‘Engaging With Vietnam’, an interdisciplinary conference held in December, where higher education was a prominent theme.

Higher education “is perhaps the most vibrant and dynamic yet unsettling topic in current Vietnam”, says Phan Le-Ha, an education professor at the University of Hawaii and co-founder of the conference, now in its 10th year. "Vietnam is going through major transformations in every sense under the leadership of the Party, while being pushed and pulled by global and regional factors as well as national pressures."

Conference attendees, most of them Vietnamese students and scholars, identified a range of problems that have contributed to a lack of public confidence in Vietnam's universities, including underpaid faculty, inadequate doctoral training, unemployed graduates and a weak track record on research.

To be more effective, Vietnamese universities must more clearly define their missions and governing model at both system and institutional levels, said Ly Pham, an independent consultant who was appointed by the prime minister of Vietnam to the National Committee for Education and Human Resource Development. The Soviet-influenced approach "did not work”, she said.

“We try to learn from best practices in the West, but [so far] it does not bring the kind of results we had anticipated, because the political and cultural context of Vietnam is different.”

The latest revisions to the law “will allow individual universities to make use of their own potential to the fullest, instead of following a uniform way of thinking and doing”, said Tran Kien, deputy director of research at the Hanoi-based Institute for Social Development Studies.

Institutional autonomy has become the gold standard for higher education governance around the world. A 2014 report by UNESCO and its International Institute for Educational Planning noted a trend at universities in other world regions that have similarly shifted to market-driven governance policies in which "the state continues to play a role, providing a framework for other non-state actors to intervene – in essence, steering from a distance".

The report found that government, whether at the provincial or ministerial level, was a "comparatively strong player" in Vietnam, and that Vietnam was still "in the relatively early stages" of governance reform.

Though it's too soon to know how closely Vietnam's government will monitor university affairs, conference attendees focused on how to make the most of new opportunities created by the revised law.

Fears over profit-minded providers

They also debated the law's support for private higher education, prompting concerns about a potential influx of low-quality profit-minded universities.

The 2012 law introduced the concept of non-profit private higher education, in which surplus revenues are reinvested in the institution rather than distributed to shareholders. The language of the 2018 amendment emphasises and prioritises a non-profit model of private higher education.

Vietnamese law treats non-profit private universities as private businesses, just as it does ownership of private universities. But the non-profit concept remains poorly understood and, without incentives to change, private universities in Vietnam continue to operate as businesses.

Another concern was an increase in pressure from parents and employers to focus on job skills, which could compromise “the true spirit, role and meaning of higher education ... to the extent that it is no longer higher education but rather a vocational, professional training”, Kien said.

In some respects, the issues raised at the conference are no different from those voiced in every other country, Ly said. Across the globe, she said, an “emerging question is, ‘What is the purpose of the university? What makes it different from a business or company?' They sound like silly questions, but they reflect the identity crisis of the university when the world is changing”.

The government’s policies are moving in “the right direction [but] there's a lot to be done [and] a lot of confusion,” said Vo Van Sen, rector emeritus of Vietnam's National University of Social Sciences and Humanities, which co-hosted the conference with the University of Phan Thiet. "It takes [a long time] for the whole higher education system to adapt to, to catch up with, the fast-pace run of the world."