A recent circular from Vietnam's Ministry of Education and Training (MoET) will cap the number of university students at no more than 15,000 per institution.
According to Nguyen Van Ang, vice chairman of the MoET Finance and Planning Department, the decree would not be applied universally this year, reports Thanh Nien. Instead, the new regulation would focus on reaching its target by 2020. The move comes after increasing class sizes have compromised the quality of Vietnamese education, according to MoET.
Under the new circular, schools would register their student population based on two critera: the ratio of students to teachers and also the school's physical acreage per student. The maximum number of students a school would be permitted to admit in all departments is 15,000, with caps on the health and arts sectors, allowing no more than 8,000 students and 5,000 students, respectively.
For the incoming school year, institutions which registered a student population lower than its 2015 target but higher than the circular's maximum would be permitted to retain all students, however those schools which exceeded their own 2015 admissions targets would be required to cut back. According to MoET, Vietnam is home to 219 universities, excluding military and police institutions, 18 of which admit over 15,000 students.
Response to the new circular has been varied, with many raising questions as to the reasoning behind these particular limits. Though MoET has assured institutions that there will be exceptions to its circular, education professionals are concerned that too many exceptions will make the regulation confusing and difficult to adminster for Vietnamese universities.
Professor Nguyen Van Cuong, principal of the Hanoi University of Culture, believes the circular is an example of a policy that looks good on paper but doesn't translate well into reality.
“I don't understand what the ministry's numbers – 15,000, 8,000 or 5,000 – are based on: is it a survey, a study from another country or research from a higher education institution?” he told Thanh Nien. “Fifteen thousand is hard for the 'big schools' to accomplish.”
According to Thanh Nien, most Vietnamese schools currently rely on tuition fees, meaning the bigger the student body, the more funding a school receives. However, rising student and teacher numbers are not encouraged, according to MoET's Ang, as more students and professors may not necessarily mean better school administration. His department is currently considering a solution to this problem, in which tuition fees are raised per governmental Resolution 86 and Decree 77, both of which permit schools to increase tuition fees.
[Photo via Quan Tri DNTU]
