Vocational schools are complaining that the lack of money, due to the limited grant from the state budget and low tuition, does not allow the producing of highly qualified workers.

Students of Hoa Sua Economics and Tourism School

Due to the limited budgets, most vocational schools have to do different types of business to feed the main training fields. Many of the schools have to enroll many students to the branches which require low training costs in order to get money to offset the training branches which require high training costs.

Nguyen Duc Tri from the Vietnam Education Science Institute related that a vocational school in Thai Nguyen City, which wanted to ensure the high quality of its graduates, accepted to bear the loss of VND 500 million to train 500 students under the two year training course.

“The state grants the same sums of money for different training branches, while the tuitions prove to be very low. As the result, vocational schools lack money for their training, which also means the low quality of training,” Tri said.

Nguyen Xuan Do, Headmaster of the Thanh Do Technology Junior College, related that his college has to practice thrift and do different types of business to get money to serve the training.

He said that as having a large plot of land, he decided to open a driving training centre, with which he can get money to spend on the college’s operation. He has also been seeking short term training contracts with enterprises (3-6 month term contracts) to get money to serve a long term training program.

“All the desks at the college and material facilities have been made by the college itself in order to save money,” Do said.

Teachers do not like practicing periods

From now to 2015, the tourism industry in Hanoi will need 35,774 new employees. By 2010, the Cau Giay district alone will have five more hotels with five-star ratings. As such, there will be a lot of job opportunities. However, students of tourism school still cannot get jobs because they cannot meet the requirements set by the employers, especially in foreign language skill, according to Trinh Xuan Dung from the Vietnam National Administration of Tourism (VNAT).

Hoa Huu Lan from the Hanoi Socio-Economics Development Studies Institute has suggested that Vietnam should allow businesses to open vocational schools. Lan said that the model allows to save investment capital, while it can bring high training quality.

Regarding the training quality, Hoang Ngoc Vinh, Director of the Professional Education Department under the Ministry of Education and Training, said that in Vietnam, businesses do not get involved in compiling the syllabuses. Meanwhile, the schools in Malaysia all have the syllabus consultancy councils which include the members from businesses. The members can give valuable consultancy about how to adjust the syllabuses to meet the demand from the society.

Vinh said that in Vietnam, accountancy lecturers sometimes get confused when making books, while the lecturers of hotel management subject have never got into five-star hotels. That explains why teachers do not want practicing periods.

Sharing the same view, Dung from VNAT said that it is necessary to set up reasonable policies which allow lecturers to go practice. Meanwhile, nowadays, lecturers have lessons in class the whole day, and they do not have time to practice.

Lan Huong