Community Colleges in Vietnam: Expanding Higher Education Accessibility

• In Event: Importance of Community Colleges and Global Counterparts to Higher Education: Building Dreams and Achieving Possibilities

Abstract

Community colleges have traditionally served the needs of their local constituencies, but around the world, they are increasingly being established as national initiatives for the purposes of global integration (Tinh 2016). This presentation charts the development of Vietnam community colleges and their current role in expanding higher education access in rural and poor regions of the country. In Vietnam, the first community colleges arose in the early 1970s, when the U.S. government established three such institutions in the South. Community colleges were dismantled after the reunification of North and South Vietnam in 1975, when the entire country adopted the Soviet higher education model. The introduction by the 6th national Congress of the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) in 1986 of a major economic plan called Doi Moi, or "renovation," heralded a new direction for the country as the Party sought to embrace capitalism while retaining its commitment to the socialist legacy of the country's beloved revolutionary leader, Ho Chi Minh. In 1991, the 7th National Congress of CPV introduced the concept of a "socialist-oriented market economy" that would reflect cultural values such as self-cultivation, moral responsibility and concern for social equity.
Drawing from the personal experiences, interviews with key stakeholders, and document analysis, the author explore and contextualize how Vietnam's community colleges have managed the forces of globalization. In particular, examination of the evolution of the community college concept is conducted in light of local demand, national goals and global trends. Of particular interest is how Vietnam's adaptation of a community college model meets the economic needs of a country in transition while also preserving its cultural identity and social values.
While education has always been held in high esteem in Confucian societies (Tran and Marginson 2014; Ashwill 2006; Jamieson 1995;), its strategic relevance in Vietnam's changing economic structure would take on new significance under Doi Moi. As more developing countries look to Western models to create higher education systems that can compete in a global economy, prospects of neocolonialism loom (Collins and Rhoads 2010). At one extreme is the potential homogenization of higher education to the point where indigenous traditions fade into obscurity; at the other is localization to the point where the education institutions are isolated and unrecognizable outside a country's borders. Vaira (2004) argues for a third possibility that allows for the integration of both forces. Despite the potential for integration to simply be a dressed-up form of neocolonialism, the concepts of flexibility and adaptation are well-understood in Vietnam, which has staked its very survival on its ability to "Vietnamize" (Tran and Marginson 2014, 7) foreign systems of thought, including Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism. Similarly, East Asian scholars have theorized the emergence of a Confucian model of the university, one that represents a hybrid of Western, market-oriented systems while maintaining Asian traditions (Zha, Shi and Wang 2016). The scholarly significance of the research shows how design can make higher education accessible to urban poor and to those who live in the geographic periphery regions of the country.

Author

• Mary Beth Marklein, George Mason University