Education in Vietnam

I’ve worked at Dong Thap University for two months now, and I’ve started to gain a better understanding of how the Vietnamese University system works. The most striking aspect of the university is how little the administration has in terms of resources. Most of the classrooms are reminiscent of the old American one-room schoolhouses. Students sit on cramped benches with small narrow tables. The only tool the teacher usually has is a blackboard. Most listening exercises have been played through the teacher’s personal laptop computer or CD player. I’ve seen two classrooms with a computer projector, in addition to the projector in the large lecture hall. There are two color printers on campus, neither of which had ink available when I asked to use them.

The number of students that these limited resources are stretched to serve is daunting. I’ve been told that Dong Thap University has approximately 20,000 students in attendance on a campus smaller than that of St. Mary’s College. The Dong Thap campus is not very large, and consists 10 hectares. To cope with the huge numbers of students, classes are taught continuously from 6:30 in the morning to 9:45 at night. There are also weekend classes taught to part-time students, so the campus facilities are almost constantly in use. There are typically about forty students per class, which severely limits the kinds of activities that can be used in a language class. Most exercises in the Pronunciation classes I assist with consist of the students repeating after the teacher in unison. Sometimes the teacher will try to correct pronunciation individually, but the number of students and the large amount of material that must be covered makes this sort of teaching impractical. As far as I can tell, the large numbers come from the Ministry of Education. Dong Thap University has very little say in the size of its incoming classes, as the Ministry of Education determines who gets in to which university based on the entrance exams. So far, the government has apparently been focused on quantity rather than quality, and so the number of students does not look like its getting lower any time soon.

Given the fact that most Vietnamese do not seem to like to travel (more on this in a future post), the graduates of a university tend to stay in the province of their university, or perhaps return home to where their family lives. In fact, it’s quite common for a university to offer a teaching position to their best BA graduates. While this sort of system does create an intimate community within the university, it also has a few flaws. First, most of the university professors only have a bachelor’s level of education. Furthermore, in the provinces, where the education level just simply isn’t as high as in the cities, the same level of teacher is retained time and time again. Dong Thap University is staffed largely by its alumni, meaning that the majority of the teachers have not had exposure to native speakers (until this semester, anyhow). Meaning no disrespect to the faculty, but this sort of arrangement makes it very difficult for Dong Thap University to raise its standards. On the positive side, many of the more experienced teachers are being encouraged to work towards their master’s degrees, which is certainly a step in the right direction, but the fact remains that Dong Thap has very little diversity in its faculty.

Vietnam looks to the United States educational system as a model, and tries very hard to emulate American colleges and universities. In spite of their hard efforts, their attempts are frustrated by several factors, a lack of resources being one of them. Perhaps more crucial, however, are the cultural factors. The Vietnamese simply view learning in a different light than Westerners. This cultural difference has provided more of a challenge than the limited resources, and I’ll elaborate more on this in my next post.