A student walks nearby the Center for International Education located in Ho Chi Minh City’s Nguyen Van Thu Street, District 1.

In his essay written for US publication The Chronicle of Higher Education titled “Higher Education and the WTO: Globalization Run Amok,” Boston College professor Philip Altbach analyses how higher education is increasingly seen as a “commercial” product that can be “traded” among countries.

Altbach, one of America’s leading experts in higher education and author of a dozen books on the efforts to transform the system in developing countries, says that when it comes to international relationships in higher education, the developed nations have all the advantages.

“It is a ‘one-way’ trade that is controlled by the developed countries,” he wrote in an email to Thanh Nien Daily. “Academic institutions from the developed countries set up branch campuses in the developing nations, not the other way around.”

Following Vietnam’s entrance to the World Trade Organization (WTO), this one-way trade, experts and local educators warn, is creating unfair competition and lets foreign institutions easily worm their way into Vietnam’s higher education, recruit students and make profits.

There are no clear statistics but, within the past couple of years, hundreds of institutions from the US and elsewhere have set up offices and branch campuses in Vietnam and signed memoranda of understanding with Vietnamese institutions.

Joint, dual programs between local and foreign partners are proliferating. There are countless newspaper ads aimed at local students for 2+2 programs (two years in Vietnam, two years abroad), or 3+1 (three years in Vietnam, one year abroad), and some programs do not even require proof of English fluency.

The surge of these programs, according to experts, results from there being too few places for Vietnam’s high school graduates in the state institutions, and the desperate desire for a foreign degree among some students and parents.

Professor Pham Quang Minh, vice president of the Vietnam National University in Ho Chi Minh City, is an outspoken higher education reformist and a proponent of international partnerships.

Partnering with foreign institutions is “key” to success in reforming domestic higher education, he says, but urges local institutions to be selective, to build partnerships with universities in the region and foster relationships with neighboring universities.

“The unwelcomed come, the welcomed don’t,” Minh told a recent conference on globalization in higher education organized by his university’s Center for Educational Testing and Quality Assessment.

According to Minh, there are two types of foreign institutions wanting to enter Vietnam: those looking to recruit top students to increase the diversity of their student body, and those out for a profit.

Last month, The Chronicle of Higher Education ran a story titled “Interest in partnerships with local institutions is high, but so are the bureaucratic hurdles.”

According to the Chronicle, “most American universities looking to set up degree programs in Vietnam are well-established, accredited institutions that understand that going into business in a new country takes a major investment of time and money” but there are some “foreign universities, unaccredited institutions that are finding Vietnam easy pickings because of the lax rules governing partnerships with foreign universities.”

The article cited the case of Northcentral University, an Arizona-based online institution, which is offering an MBA program in coordination with the Hanoi University of Technology.

The Chronicle interviewed an administrator from the State of Oregon’s Office of Degree Authorization who was quoted as saying that “until the qualifications of the faculty members in Vietnam and the quality of the program are ascertained, the degrees will not be recognized in Oregon.”

To control the flow of foreign institutions pouring into Vietnam, Minh suggested the Ministry of Education and Training designate a separate entity to license foreign institutions wanting to set up branch campuses or start joint-programs here, and hold these foreign institutions and their Vietnamese counterparts liable for their education quality.

In an interview with Sai Gon Giai Phong newspaper, Nguyen Ngoc Hung, deputy head of the ministry’s Department of International Cooperation, said the ministry could only work as a “bridge” to connect domestic and foreign institutions and it depended on local schools’ ability to build and maintain partnerships with those abroad.

Truong Quang Duoc, head of the Center for International Education (CIE) under VNU-HCMC, says the public should disregard the preconception that those undertaking partnership programs are mostly “unqualified” students who cannot get into public universities.

Though it’s true that fewer than 20 percent of Vietnam’s high school graduates go on to higher education, Duoc says, just because a student cannot get into a public university, it doesn’t mean that he or she is a poor student.

In fact, some undertaking the partnership programs at CIE have won scholarships from universities in the US and Australia, and stayed competitive when they study abroad, he says.

Therefore, these partnership programs remain a good alternative for parents and students, according to Duoc. “But there are so many of these programs, how do you know which one to choose?” he says.

The CIE chief suggest students and parents, before choosing which joint program to apply for, find out about the local institution hosting the program and talk to graduates of these programs.

According to Duoc, Vietnamese institutions should not be “dreaming” about building partnerships with institutions such as Harvard or Princeton but should look for institutions that can offer a great deal of assistance to students.

“It’s a like a marriage, you know, both sides have to be interested,” he says. “That’s when we can get things done.”

VietNamNet/TN