Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung has approved the international integration scheme for education and vocational training by 2020 with the aim of improving the quality of the sector, which ranks nearly bottom in the ASEAN. Under the scheme, Vietnam will invest more in building and modernizing the infrastructure for tertiary education, with an initial focus on developing Vietnam-Germany University, Hanoi University of Science and Technology, and Vietnam-Russia Technology University. Between 2014 and 2015, the country aims to build three universities and five vocational training schools meeting international standards, send around 3,000 lecturers abroad for advanced training, and to have around 50 training programs certified by prestigious international organizations by 2015. The figures would be five, 7,000 and 150, respectively in the 2016-2020 period. Despite huge investment by the government, there remain many problems in the Vietnamese education sector, leading to a lack of high-skilled labor in the local workforce. Educators warned that if the education system is not reformed for the better, Vietnam will be inadequate for the requirements of international integration. (www.vov.vn [1] Dec 19)
