VIETNAM HIGHER EDUCATION REFORM TO FOCUS ON MANAGEMENT
10 Mar 2010
Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Education and Training Nguyen Thien Nhan has launched a higher education reform campaign for the 2010-12 period.
Nhan called upon students, lecturers, educational administrators and authorities to become actively involved in the campaign at a video conference in Hanoi last Saturday that drew the participation of approximately 1,400 representatives from ministries and academia.
Nhan said the new campaign, instituted under the instructions of the Prime Minister, targeted educational administration in light of plenty of existing schemes aimed at improving teaching quality, curricula, and the application of science and technology in education that have failed to produce visible results.
"Despite many efforts, the proportion of university faculty holding doctoral degrees has increased only slightly in 23 years, while the scope and scale of the educational sector had been widened considerably," Nhan said. "Students still lack books and the IT application in education has yet to bring about any mighty changes." The development of education was not only influenced by teaching methods but also by educational administration.
"There's still no effective administrative co-operation among universities and among the Ministry of Education and other ministries. That's why we don't have a uniform quality assessment system applied to the whole higher education system in Vietnam," Nhan said.
He urged further decentralisation of administration, or it would take ministry inspectors at least two years just to make the rounds of 375 universities and colleges nationwide.
Da Nang University rector Bui Van Ga agreed, and called for increased recognition of the importance of fairer compensation for good faculty members.
"Our system currently doesn't distinguish between a lecturer who is actively involved in research and one who doesn't do research at all," Ga said. "But we know that, only through their own research, can lecturers effectively provide their students with knowledge, research experience and new findings." Nhan encouraged universities nationwide to pay higher salaries to faculty and said that rectors, with assistance from ministry experts, could determine proper pay levels.
He asked all universities to send in their commitments and plans of action for administrative reform no later than May 15.
Sources: Vietnam News