Twists between legalizing and banning for-profit private higher education: Vietnam as a pendulum state

• In Event: Perceptions of a moving target: how for-profit higher education is viewed globally

Proposal

This paper explores archived documents to analyze the emergence of Vietnam’s nonprofit private higher education (PHE). In the mid-1993, the state legalized PHE which was modelled after for-profit enterprises. A little more than six months later, the nonprofit subsector was also introduced. However, although both subsectors co-existed on paper, in practice, for-profit universities were tactically banned.

The significance of this paper is manifold. First, it contributes to construct the literature on Vietnam’s PHE – both for-profits and nonprofits – a part of global PHE. Many current writers on Vietnam’s PHE are uninformed of the legalization of the for-profits in 1993, nor the abrupt reverse of this legalization. More importantly, for many good reasons, the document that legalized the nonprofit subsector in 1994 was largely inaccessible to both scholars and the public. Second and relatedly, the paper enriches our understanding of the dynamics between the for-profit and nonprofit subsectors. On the one hand, Vietnam’s PHE resembles most other cases in that the for-profit subsector was outlawed (e.g. for the Philippines, see James, 1991; for South Korea, see Chae & Hong, 2009; for Thailand, see Praphamontripong, 2010). On the other hand, Vietnam differs from many others in that the state indeed banned the subsector that had been very recently legalized. This abruptness suggests the third significance – the paper unfolds a case study of the state-steering governance model which has been studied quite extensively by scholars of higher education (e.g. Marginson, 2011), including PHE experts (e.g. Zumeta, 2011; Levy, in progress). In this model, where PHE was given ample room to emerge and grow, despite holding the ultimate authority over the higher education system, the state usually refrains from direct intervention. However, this doesn’t seem to hold true in the Vietnamese case where the state intervened not only forcefully (outlawed a whole subsector) but also intensively (legalized and then banned the same subsector within a short time span). Given the political resemblance between Vietnam and China – the fourth largest PHE sector globally (PROPHE, 2018) – implications of this paper could cast speculative power on the analysis of Chinese PHE.

Author

• Quang Duong Chau, State University of New York at Albany