Vietnam’s public universities have not paid attention to building and developing their ‘brand names’ because the number of applicants has always been higher than the number of seats.  Now they must compete for the best students with universities abroad.

Vietnam’s universities don’t know who they are

“In Vietnam, a lot of long-established universities are feeding themselves on illusions about their prestige,” says Dr. Vu Thi Phuong Anh at the HCM City National University.  They have eloquently announced their intention to meet the standards of the region and the world.  However, in fact, they have never  made a serious effort to understand their images and positions,”

Dr. Anh, heads of the university’s Examination and Quality Assessment Center, said that although all over the world universities are racing to advertise their brand names, the great majority of Vietnamese universities either don’t present  themselves in a methodical way, or haven’t even made an effort.

Anh was speaking at a multinational workshop organized in Nhatrang by SEAMEO, an organization that groups educators throughout Southeast Asia.

“Just ‘Google’ on ‘university brand building,’” she said.  “Up pop two million links to university websites.  The links clearly show how universities’ emphasize brand name development, even those with well-established reputations.  If you type in the same words in Vietnamese, the number of links will double, but these are just links to forums and communication websites; there is no information from our universities about branding strategies.”

The most troubling thing, according to Dr Anh, is that no survey has been conducted so far to find out how students, employers and society in general view Vietnam’s universities.  Their relative positions have been defined simply by counting entrance exam registrations, the scores the applicants get, and minimum score for enrollment.  Therefore, she concludes, Vietnamese universities do not know who they are or where they are stand on the map of the world’s universities.

The low tuition level set for state universities guarantees that the students who want to study at state owned universities greatly outnumber the students, who [all else being equal] want to study at private universities or enter programs established cooperatively with foreign universities.

Many participants at the workshop called the indifference of the public universities to the idea of building up their ‘brand name’ the result of a history of subsidation and an oversupply of students, both persistent features of Vietnamese high education.

Universities told to rethink

Meanwhile, Dr. Gary Matkin from the University of California reported that the competition among universities in the world has become stiffer. Every education establishment tries to lure the best students and lecturers and attract grants to support scientific research.

Dr. Richard Gilbert, from an American medical college, said the best way to advertise a university’s quality is by mobilizing graduates to ‘spread the word.’

Dr. Anh also said that it is high time for Vietnamese universities to pay attention to building up their brand names.  “More and more of our top students try to go abroad to study rather than study in Vietnam.  As a consequence, the recruiting base for our top universities is shrinking.

Commenting on Vietnam’s practice of sending intellectuals abroad to study, Dr. David Wood from Australia’s Curtin University of Technology warned that there’s a downside to foreign scholarship programmes.  Many countries are trying to lure science and technology talent with preferential immigration regulations, an enticement that may ‘drain brains’ from Vietnam.