School’s Out

A visitor to Hanoi University earlier this month might have been forgiven for thinking the tree-shaded campus was preparing for a riot. Moments after a school bell rang out, a tall metal barricade was rolled into place. Dozens of police and uniformed security officials assumed positions at the entrances to the campus, and students were searched for cell phones and other forbidden objects as they entered their classrooms.

The reason for this heightened security? The authorities were guarding against cheating in high-stakes university entrance exams. When the testing concluded on July 16, a total of 1.8 million would-be scholars had taken the exams in the hope of landing one of just 300,000 places in colleges nationwide. Such pressure motivates students to seek any edge. Hanoi’s 940-year-old Temple of Literature was jammed with exam takers burning incense for good luck. Some candidates even ate “lucky meals” of green beans — the Vietnamese word for bean is the same as that for “pass.”

But students also use devious methods to make the grade. Last year two dozen were caught being fed answers through Bluetooth headsets concealed under wigs. Earlier this month, police busted a ring issuing fake IDs to university students taking the test in place of high school candidates. The price? $2,500, more than twice Vietnam’s average annual wage. Authorities have beefed up security: keeping test papers under lock and key; sequestering exam professors; calling in security to guard test sites.

Cheating isn’t epidemic — the Education Ministry has disqualified only 392 students so far this year — but it is an outgrowth of a bigger problem: the severe shortage of university places. Vietnam’s higher-education system hasn’t expanded fast enough to meet the demand from students eager to get ahead in Asia’s second fastest-growing economy (after China). Nguyen Thu Phuong, 18, studied for more than a year for the exams, and was poring over a few last-minute math equations on a bench shortly before testing began. Her mother, anxiously fanning the girl as she studied, once fought for the communist side in the Vietnam War and recently retired from a state-run factory, but she dreams of her daughter working in banking or finance. “It’s not like the old days,” Phuong’s mother says. “If children don’t have a university degree, it’s really difficult to get a good job.”

Vietnam is drawing foreign investment at a rate of nearly $1 billion per month, with investors looking to take advantage of both the country’s low wages and its young and literate population. But only 13% of college-aged youths are enrolled in higher education, lagging behind China and about a quarter of the figure for Thailand. Those numbers don’t bode well for Vietnam’s ambitions to move into higher-end electronics and outsourcing. Tom Vallely, director of the Vietnam program of Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, says the country’s universities aren’t churning out enough qualified engineers, IT workers and managers: “You are already seeing a skilled-worker shortage.”

Education officials acknowledge that quality, and not just numbers, is an issue. The élite who make it into university find that their centrally controlled curriculum is steeped in “Ho Chi Minh Thought,” with the level of courses — from law to engineering to computer science — mediocre. Professors’ pay and promotion are based on seniority, not merit, and they rarely publish in international journals. “Vietnam drastically needs education reform,” says Adam Sitkoff, director of the American Chamber of Commerce in Hanoi.

Vallely, part of a delegation of U.S. educators who met with Vietnamese President Nguyen Minh Triet during his recent visit to the U.S., says Vietnam needs a world-class flagship school — the equivalent of Tsinghua University in China or India’s Institutes of Technology. Existing schools, he says, need autonomy to build their own curriculum and compete for students. “These kids who do make the cut and go to school are very smart,” Vallely says. “They’re just not getting much of an education when they get there.” If that doesn’t change, Vietnam may wind up cheating itself.