Overview
Jul 27, 2011
Vietnamese scholarships to study in The Netherlands
Vietnam is looking abroad to educate it's best students. In the last nine years over 7000 Vietnamese students have been sent abroad to study. Studying in a foreign country is highly sought after by Vietnamese students and the government is offering many scholarships to allow the best students to live and study abroad. There are numerous scholarship programmes available that could allow Vietnamese students to study in Holland. Some opportunities are already available due to existing cooperation initiatives between Vietnam and The Netherlands. Nuffic Neso can advise and suggest programmes that are best suited for the Dutch market.
Concretely there are at least five Vietnam-funded programmes available for Vietnamese students that would be of interest to Dutch institutions. These are the Vietnam International Education Development programme (VIED), the Mekong 1000 programme (M1000), the Tra Vinh 100 programme, the East Central Vietnam programme (ECV) and the recent call for by the Ho Chi Minh University of Technical Education. Dutch Universities supporting these programmes will benefit in several ways: they will attract good students fully or almost fully funded by Vietnam and they will develop long-lasting relationships with educational institutes. Most of the students partaking in these programmes are local officials who will act as informal ambassadors for the Netherlands in general and the Dutch higher education institute he or she graduated from in particular.
For the VIED programme, the Vietnamese government is expected to increase the number of direct international scholarships available from 520 to 1000 for postgraduate students in 2010. These scholarships are part of the Vietnam International Education Development project. At present many students go to English language countries such as America, Australia and the United Kingdom. These countries are more competitive and more accommodating towards overseas students compared to The Netherlands.
The Mekong 1000 scholarship was launched as a platform project for high-level human resource training in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta region. It aims to promote the Delta’s regional development goals through training young university staff and local provincial administrators. The needs of the Mekong region coincide with Dutch strengths, such as water management, agriculture and the leading University in the region has advised the provincial leaders to choose the Netherlands to cooperate with because of these strengths.
The ECV programme is similar to the M1000 programme, but focuses on an different region in Vietnam.
The Tra Vinh 100 scholarship has the same set up as the two scholarship programmes mentioned above. It provides lecturers and provincial officials with the opportunity to study bachelor’s and Master’s degrees abroad funded by Tra Vinh province. Opportunities also exist to sponsor Dutch students majoring in English to practice their skills and teach English to Vietnamese applicants.
For more information please look under the tab "opportunities" on this page.