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 Studies in Higher Education

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The emergence of private higher education in a

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Quang Chau , Cuong Huu Nguyen & Tien-Trung Nguyen

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STUDIES IN HIGHER EDUCATION
https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2020.1817890

The emergence of private higher education in a communist state:

the case of Vietnam
Quang Chaua, Cuong Huu Nguyen b,c
and Tien-Trung Nguyen d,e

a
Department of Educational Policy and Leadership, SUNY Albany, Albany, NY, USA; bEducation Research Group, Ton
Duc Thang University, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam; cFaculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Ton Duc Thang
University, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam; dInstitute of Theoretical and Applied Research, Duy Tan University, Hanoi,
Vietnam; eVietnam Journal of Education, Hanoi, Vietnam

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
Private higher education has become an integral part of higher education Vietnam; communist;
systems worldwide, including in Vietnam. However, the details explaining demand; private; Doi Moi;
the private higher education sector emergence in Vietnam has hardly been state
addressed in the current literature. Most scholars that have mentioned this
emergence in passing believed that Vietnamese private universities
emerged to cater to the rising higher education demand that was
unmet by its public counterparts. However, interviews with senior
policy-makers, founders of private universities, and archived documents
contradict this explanation: private universities emerged when demand
for higher education declined sharply in Vietnam. Instead, our data point
out that private higher education was part of the state-led political and
economic reform. In general, we find that while the state set some
uncompromised boundaries, it left ample space for private actors to
take initiatives – although a deeper analysis reveals that the state itself
did not have a consensus view on where the censored line ends and
where the free zone starts. Throughout this article, we argue that the
notions of (public) demand vs. the state’s plan for higher education
should be contextualized with sufficient care in the context of a planned
economy like Vietnam’s.

Introduction
Despite its communist ideology, which is in essence antithetical to private ownership, the Socialist
Republic of Vietnam in 2018 celebrated its 30th anniversary since joining the world of private
higher education (PHE). In 1988, the Thang Long people-founded center of higher learning was
licensed to operate as the pilot of ‘non-state’ institutions (Chau 2017). With the legal framework con-
creted in the early 1990s, Vietnam’s PHE started to take off quickly and grew swiftly in the following
fifteen years, before it leveled off in the 2010s. Currently PHE is serving around 13% of Vietnam’s total
student population and has become an integral part of the country’s higher education system (Min-
istry of Education and Training [MOET] 2020).
However, little is known about how the PHE sector emerged in post-war Vietnam.1 Goyette (2012)
and Glewwe and Patrinos (1998) sought to find its origins from a sociological perspective – more
specifically, they referenced social stratification, that resulted from the economic liberalization of
the 1986 Đổi Mới (Reform). From the political and economic perspective, Pham and Fry (2002)
briefly suggested that Vietnam’s PHE sector emerged to meet the higher education demand that

CONTACT Quang Chau chauquang789@gmail.com Department of Educational Policy and Leadership, SUNY Albany, 1400
Washington Ave, Albany, NY 12222, USA
© 2020 Society for Research into Higher Education
2 Q. CHAU ET AL.

the public sector could not meet due to fiscal constraints. This perspective interestingly reminds us of
the public-private dynamic, which is relevant in a communist state like Vietnam, where the state gen-
erally dominates over the society. We aim to extend and dig deeper into Pham & Fry’s analytical per-
spective (2002) and more thoroughly examine the emergence of Vietnam’s PHE sector.
There are two main contributions our current study adds to the emergence of a 30-plus-year-old
sector. The first is purely academic: little is known about how new types of higher education insti-
tutions, including PHE ones, emerge in Vietnam. Secondly, this article aims to dispel a widely-per-
ceived illusion of higher education as a politics-free realm. Overall, we argue that in Vietnam,
higher education studies should be plugged in more thoroughly to the broader context of the coun-
try’s political economy.
After this introduction, our article will proceed with five main parts. We first review studies relevant
to the emergence of PHE in Vietnam. We will primarily focus on three interrelated questions: what
facilitated the emergence?, how did the emergence occur?, and who founded first private univer-
sities? We then point out how common arguments in the literature are largely inapplicable – or
only partially applicable – to the Vietnamese case, due to the uniqueness of the country’s political
economy as a communist state. The data section that follows will explain the sources of the infor-
mation we have collected for this study. Finally, we tease out key findings related to the emergence
of PHE, before closing with concluding points and suggestions for future studies.

What facilitated private higher education’s emergence?

The unmet demand argument
Unmet demand is unquestionably the most widely-cited argument that has been used to explain why
PHE emerged. Demand can be qualitative (i.e. demand for different or better higher education), but
more frequently, it is quantitative (i.e. demand for more higher education opportunities) – e.g.
Geiger (1986).2 Within the PHE literature, the quantitative demand argument is common among
global (see Kinser et al. 2010), regional (for Europe, see Slantcheva and Levy 2007; for Asia, see
Levy 2010; for Africa, see Varghese 2006; for Latin America, see Levy 1986) and country case
studies (for Australia, see Bennett, Nair, and Shah 2012; for Poland, see Siemienska and Walczak
2012). This argument is also echoed strongly in studies on higher education massification (see
Altbach 1999).
The overall argument made in the abovementioned studies posits that PHE typically emerges to
meet higher education demand that is – primarily due to fiscal constraints – unmet by the state.
Central to our article is the notion of demand, which indicates both popular demand, and the
state’s reaction to it. Scholars – such as Goastellec (2008); Marginson (2016) and Schofer and
Meyer (2005) – have used various theories to explain why higher education demand rise. Pressed
by the growing demand, the state is often left with several common policy options, including the
legalization of non-state sectors to help cater to the growing student population. Regardless of
what causes higher education demand to increase, or how the state reacts to such growing
demand, current studies tend to portray a universal context in which people can signal their
demands for higher education, and expect the state to respond. This seems to hold true primarily
in democratic countries3 that normally follow the market-oriented model of higher education gov-
ernance (see Dobbins, Knill, and Vögtle 2011). In other words, most current studies fail to critically
examine the notion of higher education demand in countries that lack an established and largely
uninterrupted democracy, where the state plays a predominant – if not dictatorial – role in governing
higher education.
Therefore, studies on higher education in interventionist states such as South Korea (Kim 2008;
Weidman and Park 2000) and Taiwan (Wang 2003; Law 1995; Chou 2008) supply us with more rel-
evant insights into our inquiry. Before the democratization in both countries in the late 1980s,
higher education expansion had largely been initiated by military governments as a leverage for
 STUDIES IN HIGHER EDUCATION 3

rapid industrialization. The governments tended to dictate specifically which higher education sector
(public or private) should lead the expansion at which level (university education or professional
training). For instance, in South Korea, although the Park Chung-hee and Chun Doo-hwan adminis-
trations imposed admission and graduation quotas at public universities, they simultaneously
diverted excess demand to private junior colleges. Generally, in these countries, higher education
expansion and the emergence of PHE were relatively independent, since both were largely coordi-
nated through the state.
Studies on PHE in China (Liu 2020; Wang 2014) and other former Communist states – such as
Russia (Suspitsin 2007), Poland (Duczmal 2006), and several others (Giesecke 1998) – are probably
most helpful in our attempt to understand how PHE emerged in Vietnam. The key difference
between these and the above-examined countries is the absence of market, including the higher
education market. Higher education in communist countries was closely linked with economic plan-
ning – the state imposed rigid quotas and provided full subsidy for enrollment, and all graduates
were employed by the state sector. Therefore, the notion of popular demand for higher education
needs to be critically investigated. In general, PHE emergence in these countries, just as in others,
was often associated with the growing demand for higher education. However, such higher edu-
cation expansion did not occur separately from the state-led reforms in political liberalization and
economic privatization.
Succinctly, although state’s legalization is required for PHE to emerge, the state plays different
facilitating roles in democratic and less democratic countries. In the former, PHE’s emergence
tends to be facilitated by growing demand for higher education. In less democratic countries,
however, the state seems to be the key coordinator between higher education expansion and
PHE’s emergence. (See Figure 1 below).

Figure 1. Unmet demand argument in different countries. Source: Authors’ illustration based on reviewed studies.
4 Q. CHAU ET AL.

Other non-demand arguments

While the unmet demand argument focuses on internal factors, some authors turn to external vari-
ables to explain PHE’s emergence. For example, some (e.g. Robertson 2012; Mundy and Menashy
2014) cite the World Bank as a leading agency that promoted higher education privatization. This
pro-privatization policy stemmed from Psacharopoulos’ groundbreaking work on returns to invest-
ment in education, which consistently pointed out that private returns exceed public ones at the ter-
tiary level (Psacharopoulos 1981, 1985, 1994; Psacharopoulos and Hinchliffe 1973; Psacharopoulos
and Patrinos 2004, 2018).
Outwardly, Buckner concluded that PHE had grown worldwide because private institutions have
become a globally accepted model in higher education (Buckner 2017). The researcher went as far as
to challenge internal factors, arguing that neither demographic growth nor economic constraint can
comprehensively explain the global expansion of PHE.

How did private higher education emerge?

Levy (2006) argued that the PHE emergence came as a surprise to most governments. Although the
PHE sector often needed the state’s legalization to emerge, rarely did the idea or a plan for PHE come
from within the state. It is also surprising that PHE often emerged from broad changes occurring
outside of the higher education realm. In addition, the unanticipated emergence was usually fol-
lowed by ‘delayed regulation’: after the state was caught off guard by PHE’s spectacular growth, it
eventually reacted with a number of regulations.
Empirical evidence in favor of the unanticipated emergence argument appears in many cases. For
example, Oncu (1971) vividly showed how private university founders in Turkey took advantage of a
legal loophole to establish PHE. In European Post-communist countries, PHE largely emerged from
the broad political and economic changes that external to the higher education system, and thus
caught the states by great surprise (e.g. see Slantcheva and Levy 2007).
The unanticipated emergence argument tends to be less applicable in countries that are less
democratic. South Korean and Taiwanese PHE emerged largely from major political and economic
– rather than higher education – reforms, as the unanticipated argument indicates. However, such
reforms were essentially planned by the state, but not spontaneously produced. Phrased differently,
PHE emergence does not seem to be a considerable surprise in the case of these states. In some
countries, like Japan (Geiger 1986), the state even explicitly specified which type of private insti-
tutions they would and would not allow.
PHE emergence in China was surprising, but only partly. On the one hand, state-led political and
economic reforms of the late 1970s created room for PHE to emerge. On the other hand, the increase
in the number of private institutions was staggering. Though never explicitly mentioned, surprise
appeared to be the overall tone in Qin and Yang’s (1993) documentation of the ‘silent resurgence’
of Chinese PHE. In the formative years of Chinese PHE, the state did not seem to limit the number
of private institutions which were non-universities and prepared students for self-study higher edu-
cation programs. Therefore, the state was caught by surprise when such institutions applied for
the right to grant degrees.

Who initiated the emergence?

The questions of what and how naturally lead us to answer who initiated PHE. What interests us
though is not who founded private universities, but instead who pioneered the establishment of
the first private universities in a given country. Religious organizations are most often such pioneers
(for the US, see Geiger (2015); for Latin American countries, see Levy (1986); for African countries, see
Varghese (2006)). Almost by default, religiously-affiliated privates are non-profit and aim to pursue
religious missions.
 STUDIES IN HIGHER EDUCATION 5

People in business initiated the foundation of PHE in many other countries, such as Saudi Arabia
(Jamjoom 2012), Turkey (Oncu 1971), and Morocco (Buckner 2018). Given that businessmen-founded
universities usually pursue profit-driven motives, rarely does the state provide them with direct sub-
sidies (Levy 2011). Furthermore, many of them are indeed non-universities and thus are often faced
with criticism from established public counterparts concerning legitimacy – as the Turkish case vividly
illustrates.
Studies on Chinese PHE point to a third group who pioneered the foundation of PHE: people
affiliated with the state bureaucracy, including retired faculty members at public universities (Cai
and Yan 2011; Lin 1999). Liu (2020) even found that some private institutions were initially estab-
lished in partnership with public universities. Public policies for PHE emergence in the Chinese
case seemed to be ambiguous and largely inconsistent.

Relevance to the Vietnamese case

There has been no study that critically examines PHE’s emergence in Vietnam. However, many works
on Vietnamese PHE mention in passing two different logics of unmet demand. The first group of
scholars, such as Pham and Vu (2019), Le and Ashwill (2004), and Le (2006), portray the state as
largely reactive to higher education demand. For instance, Le (2006) highlights that the higher edu-
cation demand was never satisfied, even after public universities had already enrolled additional stu-
dents on a fee-paying basis. It was this mismatch between student and parent demand that
facilitated the emergence of PHE. In contrast, the state appears more proactive in Pham and Fry’s
(2002) descriptive study on Vietnamese PHE’s emergence. They argued that state-led reform in the
late 1980s paved the way for economic development, which required more highly skilled workers.
The state, faced with financial constraints, eventually decided to legalize PHE.
Although never studied thoroughly, the question of how PHE emerged in Vietnam was briefly dis-
cussed in some studies. St. George (2010) concluded that it was not the state, but higher education
institutions themselves that initiated the experiment with PHE – although the experiment was closely
supervised by the state. She also discovered that after the first institution was founded as a pilot
project for the PHE sector, private universities kept emerging through most of the 1990s until
quality concerns were widely circulated in the media. This urged the Minister to suspend license issu-
ance for new private universities. Le (2006) pointed out that neither of the first two higher education
review projects after Đổi Mới included PHE. Overall, both Le (2006) and St. George (2010) echoed the
unanticipated emergence argument. In contrast, Pham (1997) revealed that since its inception, PHE
had attracted policy-makers’ attention. Discrepant viewpoints on PHE among various social and pol-
itical actors urged policy-makers to consider the sector with additional care and caution.
Most founders of Vietnamese first private universities were retired public university professors or
former state officials (Pham and Fry 2002). Chau, Dang, and Nguyen (2020) elaborated that political
credentials and personal connections with policy-makers were key for founding teams to obtaining
private university licenses. Furthermore, although not legally mandated, most of these universities
needed to secure legal sponsorship from state-controlled social organizations.

Data collection
Given the nature of the research questions, we adopted a qualitative approach, with document analy-
sis and interviewing being two main research methods. Document analysis played the principal role
in this research, since the emergence of Vietnam’s PHE, which occurred about 30 years ago, may be
remembered incorrectly by those who were involved in the event. Furthermore, as St. George (2003)
pointed out, the interviewed Vietnamese policy-makers tended to cite grand theories like Marxism,
and policy orientations like the Party’s resolutions to explain what policies should look like. They
seemed quite indifferent to details such as dates when a particular event occurred. The overlook
6 Q. CHAU ET AL.

of these details would significantly limit the scope of the data that interviews can contribute to this
topic.
There were two types of documents that we relied on. First was Education Statistical Yearbooks,
published by the General Statistics Office of Vietnam. Second, we collected unpublished policy docu-
ments, such as policy drafts, policy discussions, minutes of policy-makers’ meetings, and reports con-
ducted by state agencies or state-appointed committees. These documents, which are all in
Vietnamese, cover the period of late 1980s to early 1990s and are mainly stored in the National
archives III.
We did not discredit the interview method altogether, but used it as a supplementary method of
data collection. The first and key group of interviewees were policy-makers who had been involved in
the policy-making process in higher education during the time period this paper focuses on –
between the late 1980s and the early 1990s. In Vietnam, three main agencies tasked with making
higher education policies are the Central Commission of Science and Education (under the Party),
Committee for Culture, Education, Youth, Adolescents and Children (under the National Assembly),
and the Ministry of Education and Training (MOET, under the Government). In principle, Resolutions
made by the Central Commission of Science and Education provide political legitimacy for the other
two agencies to discuss and make policies. However, it was not until 1990 that MOET was formed
from the amalgamation of the Ministry of Education (responsible for K-12 education) and the Ministry
of Higher, Vocational and Professional Education (MHVPE) (Tran 1995). Around Đổi Mới (1986), MHVPE
– and later MOET (since 1990) – was especially active in proposing new policies, including those
related to PHE. Consequently, MHVPE and MOET officials became our richest sources of information.
Besides policy-makers, we also approached founding members of first non-state universities – both
people-founded and semi-public ones (the definition of both types of universities will be given
below).
Interviewees were recruited through the snowball sampling technique, i.e. existing interviewees
were asked to recommend other policy-makers and founding members as people we should
approach for more information. All interviewed policy-makers, and most (except for two) university
founders were retired, and appeared very open to comment on our questions. In total, we inter-
viewed 15 people – 8 policy-makers and 7 university founders – during August 2018 and January
2020. All interviews were in Vietnamese. For data triangulation purposes, we both cross-checked
interviewees’ responses with information retrieved from archived documents, and requested
follow-up interviews with key policy-makers who revealed rich and relevant data. We included in
these follow-up interviews several questions previously asked in the first interview to check for con-
sistency and validation.

The myth of higher education expansion and demand

Contrary to what Le and Ashwill (2004); Pham and Vu (2019) and Goyette (2012) assumed in their
presentation of unmet demand arguments, Vietnam’s higher education sector shrank dramatically
during the PHE’s emergence, as Table 1 below illustrates. Overall, university enrollment reached its
peak in 1981 only to fall continuously until the conclusion of the decade. In the 1980s, total enroll-
ment dropped by 11%. Worse, this drop had already been considerably offset by the expansion of
the supplementary In-service and Specialized university education categories.4 Although incomplete,
our data indicate a 30% drop in full-time enrollment within only six years between 1981 and 1986.
An inter-sectoral analysis offers an alternative perspective of higher education expansion. As Table
1 shows, the high school sector expanded, almost uninterruptedly, by roughly one third between
1980 and 1989. With high school enrollment rising and higher education declining, the transition
rate between the sectors became considerably low. In 1989, only one out of ten high school students
entered higher education, whereas, in the early 1980s, the rate was almost twice as high.
However, the growing high school enrollment and the declining high school to higher education
transition rate did not necessarily press the state to expand higher education. As in other communist
Table 1. Snapshot of Vietnam’s education system in the 1980s.
University enrollment
Population Primary enrollment Secondary enrollment High school enrollment Total Full-time Specialized supplementary In service University graduates
1980 52,462,300 7,923,495 3,070,984 633,320 149,768 125,605 4,194 19,969 22,901
1981 53,722,000 7,972,604 3,175,509 688,494 153,897 121,074 8,342 24,481 25,651
1982 54,926,700 7,930,537 3,068,724 680,738 149,292 111,596 8,620 29,076 29,184
1983 56,170,000 7,690,181 2,961,418 689,548 139,331 101,831 8,639 28,861 33,036
1984 57,373,000 7,855,310 2,927,703 715,199 128,732 93,220 8,001 27,511 33,610
1985 58,653,000 8,012,927 3,020,084 780,108 125,736 90,537 7,940 27,259 27,900
1986 59,872,200 8,166,372 3,182,345 851,288 126,200 88,600 8,800 28,800 25,600
1987 61,109,300 8,374,879 3,197,455 910,565 121,195 N/A N/A N/A 18,347
1988 62,452,400 8,509,412 3,201,925 911,869 127,312 N/A N/A N/A 18,090
1989 63,727,400 8,473,749 2,912,921 817,155 133,136 N/A N/A N/A 19,288
Source: General Statistics Office (2004) and Sloper and Can (1995).

STUDIES IN HIGHER EDUCATION

7
8 Q. CHAU ET AL.

states, higher education in Vietnam followed the central planning mechanism: enrollment quotas
were set rigidly, based on the state bureaucracy’s demand for human resources as well as the
state budget.
Although statistics are not available, human resource demand and the state budget were indeed
scarce, as implied by anecdotal evidence which portrays Vietnam then as a nation on the verge of
bankruptcy. The Reunification in 1975 was immediately followed by millions of people seeking
refuge abroad, which dramatically eroded the economy. Enormous US aid flows for South Vietnam
were stopped altogether. The international embargo that was in effect after Vietnam’s military
entered Cambodia in 1979, together with the brief war in the same year with the second-largest com-
munist state (China), only deepened domestic crises. The first Five-year plan (1976–1980) established
in the post-war period failed spectacularly: none of the major targets were met (Tran et al. 2000). The
second Five-year plan (1980–1985) started with several market-friendly initiatives (Dang 2008) and
optimism but did not conclude successfully (Duiker 1986). Three notable trends of economic devel-
opment between 1975 and 1985 were (a) low economic growth rate, (b) financial deficits and heavy
reliance on foreign aid, and (c) hyper-inflation (General Statistics Office 2004). Doi Moi in 1986 –
announced amid the record-high inflation rate – proceeded cautiously. The concluding year of the
decade was still ‘the year of living dangerously’ (Elliott 2012) because it remained unclear whether
reformists or conservatives would prevail. For a country faced with such chronic economic and pol-
itical crises, it seemed impossible to provide more budget for higher education and to employ more
graduates in the state bureaucracy and collective economy. In other words, this anecdotal evidence
goes a long way to justify the claim made by interviewees T, L, and K (former senior MOET officials)
that higher education shrinkage resulted from the state’s cut of enrollment quotas.
What did higher education’s enrollment crunch mean for higher education demand? University
graduates are probably the strongest indicator capable of demythologizing the misconception of
growing higher education demand. During the 1980s, universities graduated fewer and fewer stu-
dents (as illustrated by table 1). One may attribute this downward trend to declining enrollment.
However, our analysis of documents and interviews revealed a different explanation – i.e. the increas-
ing repetition and drop-out rate. In a command economy like Vietnam, all graduates must be
employed by the state. The aforementioned crises almost paralyzed the state’s ability to absorb
more graduates; tenures for the state bureaucracy were saturated. As a result, under-employment
became widespread. A 1989 survey put the number of under-employed workers in state-owned
enterprises at half a million (General Statistics Office 2004). In the same year, more than half a
million veterans returned from Cambodia. The need to integrate these veterans back into civil life
– since the vast majority of them were ineligible to sit the university entrance exam – only deepened
the employment crisis. Faced with uncertain job prospects, students lost their motivation to study;
many chose to drop out. Demotivated students appeared repeatedly in our interviews with several
senior policy-makers. All in all, although higher education demand did not disappear altogether,
growing higher education demand seemed to be a seriously misconceived notion in this context.
The gloomy picture of Vietnamese universities in the late 1980s would be incomplete without
mentioning demotivated faculty members, who could barely live off their salary. Since the state
budget for higher education was calculated based on the number of students served, enrollment
decline meant less funding for universities. As a consequence, faculty members were significantly
underpaid (Interviewee T). This explanation is also voiced by a member of a higher education
review committee (see St. George 2003, 233). Succinctly, beside demotivated students were impover-
ished professors who spent most of their time trying to make their ends meet.

The emergence of private higher education: state as a key facilitator

In December 1986, Đổi Mới was officially announced by the Communist Party of Vietnam (see Dang
2008; Fforde and De Vylder 1996 for more information on why, and how Vietnam departed from a
planned economy). Its market-building then penetrated into the higher education realm through
 STUDIES IN HIGHER EDUCATION 9

the Nha Trang higher education summit in summer 1987. Basically, the summit signified a departure
from the central planning mechanism in higher education, which enabled PHE to emerge. At the
summit, university presidents approved a four-point reform agenda. Out of the four foci, three stipu-
lated that (i) the higher education system would train human resources for both state and non-state
sectors, (ii) universities’ revenues should also be drawn from non-state entities, and that (iii) graduates
would seek employment for themselves.
Indirectly, this reform agenda provided important legitimacy for the market to make its inroads
into higher education – an essential foundation that would soon facilitate PHE’s emergence. First
and furthermost, not only did the agenda concrete the tuition-charging practice – a market’s core
element – that had been piloted in 1985, when the University of Ho Chi Minh City (Đại học Tổng
hợp TP.HCM) established the country’s first open admission scheme (Tran 1998). The agenda also
spread this tuition-charging practice to nearly a third of all universities nationwide in the 1988–
1989 academic year.
Apart from this open-admission scheme, the MHVPE in 1988 also introduced another type of fee-
charging admission that helped inject competition into public universities (St. George 2003; Tran
1998). Accordingly, there were two scenarios for qualified students that chose to take the university
entrance exam. Those who successfully passed the exam (regular students) would receive tuition
waivers and monthly stipend, and would also be employed by the state upon graduation. Those
who narrowly failed the entrance exam could still enter universities as fee-payers, would sit in the
same classroom, be taught by the same professors and with the same curriculum (off-budget students).
However, regular students can become off-budget ones if they fail the exam held after the second year,
whereas off-budget students that fared well in the exam could be promoted to regular ones.
The Nha Trang reform agenda also indirectly influenced the creation of the employment market,
since graduates were free to seek jobs outside the state sector and collective economy. This reflected
a relatively radical change in thinking. As mentioned by interviewee T, higher education had tra-
ditionally been tasked with supplying human resource for the five-year plan, which was then
broken down to yearly plans. This reactive function was reversed to a more proactive one after
the Nha Trang summit. Accordingly, university graduates were then expected to lead the socio-econ-
omic developments. This change in thinking was confirmed by St. George (2003) who conducted
meticulous analysis of writings published in the state’s and party’s official mouthpieces.
These market-creating initiatives in turn brought about the sunning growth of higher education.
Open admission schemes witnessed massive enrollment of hopeful students who had been pre-
viously rejected by universities due to their political affiliation with the former Saigon regime
(1954–1975). Interviewee H (a manager of the open admission scheme at the University of Ho Chi
Minh City) recalled that students came from significantly diverse backgrounds – including pastors
and manual laborers. Universities generated more revenue and revived their underpaid faculty
members. All in all, although predominantly focusing on the public university sector, the reform
agenda of Nha Trang summit established an essential pathway for PHE to emerge in Vietnam.
Leadership factors played a crucial role in sustaining the higher education reform in general and
the emergence of PHE in particular. Many interviewees revealed that at that time there existed two
conflicting groups within Vietnam’s education system. The MHVPE Minister was widely regarded as a
reformist, while the Minister of (K-12) Education a conservative. It was the reformist Minister who was
promoted to the head of MOET when the two ministries merged in 1990 that helped to sustain the
reform. The promotion of one over the other was obviously a political decision, but it also reflected
the prevalence of the reformist movement in Vietnam’s political system (interviewees D and M).
Although international organizations endorsed policies related to the emergence and develop-
ment of Vietnam’s PHE, their influences seemed insignificant. In late 1989, the United Nations Devel-
opment Program and MOET jointly conducted the first comprehensive review of the national
education system in the Post- Đổi Mới era. The project concluded in 1993 with a wide range of
policy recommendations, including the promotion of PHE. However, the project itself was mostly
staffed with MOET cadres and only nine international experts, the longest-serving of whom remained
10 Q. CHAU ET AL.

involved for less than 2 years. Indeed, the idea of PHE had already been circulated within Vietnam’s
higher education policy-making circles before the project commenced.

A general idea, neither meticulous plans, nor detailed regulations

Three uncompromised conditions
Our data show that policy-makers’ PHE narratives were considerably simple, and primarily consisted
of three elements. The first element is related to ideology. The term ‘private’ was regarded as a central
concept of capitalism, and thus sounded politically incorrect, and it was replaced by the term ‘non-
state.’ Non-state institutions, especially in the ‘people-founded’ form (as elaborated below), had
existed in North Vietnam (1954–1975), though only at the K-12 level. Furthermore, the concept of
people-founded schools, as well as the term itself, had previously been used in the People Republic
of China, and thus conveyed necessary political legitimacy.
Early PHE narratives also centered around control. Instead of issuing a legal framework to regulate
the forthcoming non-state sector, the state moved rather cautiously with the establishment of a
piloted people-founded center for higher learning (Thang Long) in 1988. A MOET official was
assigned to sit at the center’s governance board with the goal to observe this pilot operation for
law-drafting purposes, and simultaneously to ensure the state’s supervision (Interviewee L).
Both non-state university forms – people-founded and semi-public – were indirectly affiliated with
the state. People-founded universities were institutions founded by state-controlled social organiz-
ations. When analyzing the establishment applications of people-founded universities, we found
that almost all of the approved applications included endorsement from social organizations. Semi-
public universities were mostly founded by the conversion of public universities’ legal status – i.e.
when a public university no longer receives the state’s annual appropriation but instead draws its
revenue almost entirely from private income, especially tuition, then it becomes a semi-public univer-
sity. Although classified as non-state, semi-publics remained to be governed as public universities. The
state appointed the university’s board of rectors, decided all academic matters, and dictated how rev-
enues would be spent. Another striking aspect of the control narrative – as our analysis of archived
documents revealed – was the heavy involvement of the Ministry of Home Affair (Bộ Nội vụ) and the
Ministry of Public Security (Bộ Công an) in evaluating non-state university establishment applications.
The third narrative – which resembles what PHE has been defined as globally – centered around
funding: non-state universities are meant to be institutions that would not rely on the state’s funding.
This narrative was repeatedly stressed in both policy documents concerned with non-state univer-
sities, and in interviews with university founders. Non-state university applications often explicitly
assured policy-makers that the university would not receive state money, although this requirement
had already been consistently specified in legal documents. Conversations between policy-makers
and university founders, which are found in two published memoirs, also highlight the funding dis-
course. For example, when a semi-public university founder applied for a degree-granting license, he
was told that since the university did not ask for the state’s subsidy, the license would be approved
quickly. At that time, a similar university was applying for the same license, but its application would
be scrutinized because it expected appropriations from the state. Similarly, interviewee S, a founding
member of one of the first people-founded universities, revealed that the university was licensed
under the condition that it would not ask for state subsidies: ‘As long as [interviewee S’] university
will not receive state’s funding, it’s good to go; for all other practical matters, lower agencies will
have follow-up steps’ (interviewee S recalled the conversation with a high-rank policy-maker).

Ample space for private initiatives

Apart from the three aforementioned narratives, the state left ample space for non-state actors to
take initiative. Until the end of the 1990s, most people-founded universities were established by
 STUDIES IN HIGHER EDUCATION 11

noted professors in public universities and retired state cadres. Most interviewed policy-makers
agreed that academic credentials and political influences of the founding team were key criteria
that decided whether a people-founded university would get a license.
The state even welcomed initiatives that involved Vietnamese diaspora. For example, the idea
of Vietnam’s first non-state university originated from a noted Vietnamese mathematician in
France. Although not involved later in the license application and governance issues, he played
a key role in mobilizing donations from the Vietnamese diaspora community in France to
finance the university in its infant years. Similarly, a Vietnamese professor in Japan planned to
mobilize financial support from Japanese philanthropists to co-found with his friend, a then
National Assembly member, the first non-state university in Central Vietnam. While the friend in
Vietnam was exploring license requirements, the professor found that donating to a university
abroad was unprecedented in Japan (Interviewee V). As a consequence, the joint attempt did
not materialize.
Most strikingly, the state proactively invited feedback on non-state university policies from people
outside of the policy-making circle. A central figure behind the establishment of the first non-state
universities was invited to join the policy-drafting team (Interviewee S). A MOET leader chose to
take an unprecedented and bold approach and consulted with a former senior administrator of a
major private university in South Vietnam, who was simultaneously a known political dissent (Inter-
viewee L).
People-founded universities differ considerably in how they were established. Before applying
for the license, some founding teams exhausted all efforts and resources to meet established
requirements that were stipulated by the state. Many – referred by interviewee D as ‘fighting
bare-handed’ (tay không bắt giặc) – were, in contrast, founded almost from scratch: they only
hired faculty and signed facility rental contracts after having prepared falsified documents and
getting the license approved. On the other end of the spectrum, some universities slowly
evolved from English or Information Technology training centers. These centers not only received
licensure more easily, but were also enormously profitable. English and computer education were
in especially high demand during the era of social and economic opening after many years of
embargo. Consequently, to open such centers appeared a wise step for many people if they
wanted to build up their academic credentials and financial resources and get ready to found
non-state universities.

Disjointed incrementalism policy-making

Initially, the state did not seem to come to a consensus on what should be uncompromised vs.
what should be left for private initiatives. Several interviewed policy-makers mentioned a striking
example which centered around the terms private vs. people-founded. In the early 1990s, the
Prime Minister – based on what had been agreed upon by the Party – legalized private univer-
sities. Although not dismissed, this decision was not implemented, and it was soon hurriedly
replaced by a Decree signed by his subordinate, which promoted people-founded universities.
Interestingly, as interviewee D asserted, the policy reversal was merely a name game: while the
term ‘people-founded’ replaced ‘private,’ regulations stipulated in the Executive Order remained
essentially unchanged in the Decree. Our analysis of the two documents confirmed the intervie-
wee’s claim.
Even after the Decree laid out a solid legal foundation for people-founded universities, what was
not said under the three aforementioned uncompromised conditions was not necessarily left freely
unregulated for private initiatives. The state rather spontaneously intervened in various practical
matters. For example, as an unwritten rule, policy-makers refused to license people-founded univer-
sities that were named after a city or a province; they argued that these names were reserved only for
public universities. However, two people-founded universities that carried the name of the province
where they were founded, eventually managed to get licensed.
12 Q. CHAU ET AL.

Discussion & conclusion

This article aims to shed light on the emergence of Vietnam’s PHE. We argue that private universities
in Vietnam did not primarily emerge from the growing public demand. While many authors have
assumed that higher education was expanding so rapidly that PHE needed to become legalized to
meet the demand unmet by public universities, our collected enrollment data suggest a supplemen-
tary explanation. Like Wang (2014), who examined the phenomenal expansion of Chinese higher
education in the late 1990s, we further highlight that the notion of higher education demand
should be considered more carefully when applied in less democratic countries and centrally
planned economies like Vietnam.
Succinctly, we argue that Vietnamese PHE emerged primarily from state-led higher education
reforms – more specifically, the higher education summit in 1987 (Nha Trang summit). Although
focusing primarily on public universities, the summit’s reform agenda created market elements –
tuition, competition, and growing higher education demand – for private universities to emerge.
International factors also played a role in the emergence of Vietnam’s PHE, but this role was rather
insignificant. International organizations – e.g. the United Nations Development Program – had little
influence. Likewise, we rarely found evidence of archived documents that referenced PHE models in
other countries. This challenges Buckner (2017), who argued that PHE expands worldwide because it
has been a globally accepted model. However, it cannot be ignored that many overseas Vietnamese
were active in feeding PHE ideas, as well as mobilizing financial resources for first private universities
in Vietnam.
The Vietnamese state seemed to have fairly simplistic perceptions of PHE during the sector’s
infancy. We find three key conditions that the state judged as uncompromisable. First and foremost,
PHE must be ideologically correct. Furthermore, non-state universities should be placed under the
state’s control, but without any expectations of public funding.
Conflicts between these three conditions – communist ideology, control, and private funding –
have remained a key and common thread running through most higher education policies until
now. For example, fear of losing the state’s control over higher education has urged the party’s the-
orists and policy-makers to persistently apply the collective ownership – a staple of communist ideol-
ogy – into PHE. Accordingly, investors were perceived purely as money lenders, not university owners
(see Chau, Dang, and Nguyen 2020). Likewise, the Vietnamese public university sector has recently
witnessed a remarkably radical reform in higher education funding. The state proposed that public
universities would stop receiving an annual appropriation in exchange for more autonomy in
select areas – except for fundamental matters including leadership appointment and curriculum
(e.g. see Võ and Laking 2019). These conflicts tend to place Vietnam’s higher education under dra-
matic constraints.
Apart from the three aforementioned conditions, the state left ample space for private initiatives.
Consequently, some people-founded universities were newly established, while several others
emerged from existing private centers for English and Information Technology. Regardless, since
the quality was among many things the state left open for privates’ interpretation and implemen-
tation, people-founded universities quickly became targets for criticism due to their deteriorating
quality. Many universities enrolled remarkably more than their enrollment quota allowed and
charged multiple hidden fees. At the same time, people-funded universities failed to improve their
teaching quality and had no plan to develop their mostly adjunct faculty. Such scams hit the head-
lines in the late 1990s and eventually resulted in the state’s decision to suspend licensing of new non-
state universities (see St. George 2003).
Overall, we find that unanticipated emergence holds only partially true in case of Vietnam. The
state created enabling conditions for private universities to emerge and then decided what it
would tolerate, versus what would be uncompromised – although the decisions caused some
debate within the state bureaucracy. Furthermore, although leaving ample space for private initiat-
ives, the state remained spontaneously interventionist in practical matters. Last but not least,
 STUDIES IN HIGHER EDUCATION 13

exponential PHE expansion, as postulated by the unanticipated emergence thesis, did not occur in
Vietnam, because each university was given a rigid enrollment quota – a vestige of the central plan-
ning economy.
Like in the Chinese case, founders of the first private universities in Vietnam were affiliated with
either the state bureaucracy or the public sector: state cadres, party officials, and former presidents
of public universities. This finding aligns with other studies on Vietnam’s transition to a market
economy – for example, Gainsborough (2003, 2009). More broadly, the involvement of the state
bureaucracy and public sector in the emergent private economy was commonly cited in Post-Com-
munist studies (Holmes 1997). This seems especially true in countries that adopted the gradual pri-
vatization approach like Vietnam and China, where the communist party remained powerful enough
to orchestrate the transition to a market economy.
This article suggests a more comprehensive thinking about the state’s role in Vietnam’s higher
education. In general, the state steering (Levy forthcoming) and central planning (Zumeta 2011) gov-
ernance models best describe the state-PHE dynamic in Vietnam: the state dictates what role its state-
funded sector will play, versus what size and which shape PHE is expected to grow. In this article, we
pointed out three factors that could be interpreted as either strengthening or weakening the state’s
role in Vietnam’s state-steering model. First, policy-makers sought consultation from those outside
the policy circle, which they often do by reaching out to individuals they know personally, rather
than approaching official channels such as (public) academic organizations. The second factor con-
cerned spontaneity: the state did not seem to have a well-thought-out plan for PHE, and thus it often
made random decisions regarding when and how to intervene. Relatedly, by no means does the state
notion indicate a consensus view on what needs to be done; instead, the Vietnamese state consists of
a constellation of interest groups (Gainsborough 2007). Thus, which policies are chosen, or when such
policies are reversed, should be placed in a broader context depending on which interest group is
prevailing. All in all, we argue that the state’s role should receive more attention in future studies
on Vietnam’s higher education.

Notes
1. During the time when Vietnam was divided (1954–1754) into two separate nations, private higher education was
legalized in South Vietnam (the Republic of Vietnam). However, all private education institutions were either
closed or merged with public ones after the fall of Saigon.
2. This different, better, and more PHE typology is highly interrelated with Levy’s (forthcoming, 1986) identity, elite,
and demand-absorbing types of private higher education institutions.
3. The democratic vs. less democratic dichotomy is obviously simplistic and disputable. However, in this article, we
define democratic countries loosely as those where the state is generally accommodating to public demands,
whereas less democratic ones as those where public demands are not usually followed by a response from
the state. The less democratic category includes absolute monarchies, some developmental states, and one-
party countries.
4. In-service and Specialized programs were not open to all students willing to pay. Instead, both categories enrolled
only employees in the state bureaucracy or collective economy who would be financially sponsored by their
workplace.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

ORCID
Cuong Huu Nguyen http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6627-3824
Tien-Trung Nguyen http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3320-8962
14 Q. CHAU ET AL.

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