There Will No Longer be "Fake PhDs"!

Vietnam is known for having the highest number of professors and doctors in Southeast Asia. According to statistics from the Ministry of Education and Training, as of 2013, Vietnam had approximately more than 23,000 doctors, five times the number of doctors in Japan at that time.

Though the numbers are high, in reality, Vietnam does not have any universities listed among the top 500 universities in the world. Annually, the number of articles published in prestigious scientific journals around the world can be counted on one hand, which is even lower than the number of scientific articles from a single university in Japan or South Korea.

Causes and Consequences

The main reason for this can be said to be that some state management officials are competing to "buy" doctorate degrees to get "promoted and advance their careers." For instance:

At the beginning of June 2010, Phu Tho province was abuzz when it was discovered that Mr. Nguyen Ngoc An, Director of the Department of Culture, Sports, and Tourism of Phu Tho province, did not know English but still obtained a doctorate degree from the Southern Pacific University in the United States.

"Doctor" Nguyen Van Ngoc, at the time the Deputy Secretary of Yen Bai Province Party Committee, also obtained his doctorate degree from Southern Pacific University in just 6 months for 17,000 USD.

The most notable recent case is Mr. Duong Chi Dung, known as an "economics doctor," but the economic consequences he caused were significant for the units he had worked for.

How to Overcome?

Recognizing the significant consequences of "fake doctors" causing damage to the economy and hindering the development of the country, it is essential to rectify and regulate the situation. Therefore, the Ministry of Education and Training issued Official Dispatch 2670/BGDDT-GDDH to review the conditions ensuring the quality of doctoral training institutions from 2013 to the present.

The main objective is to evaluate the doctoral-level training of training institutions and each training discipline, while also supplementing and updating the database on doctoral training nationwide.

To be specific, doctoral training institutions must declare information before June 30, 2016, according to regulations on issues including: total number of lecturers, management staff, scientific staff, and service staff on the payroll of the training institution (full-time); Total number of full-time professors, professors with a Doctor of Science, full-time doctors; Total number of associate professors, associate professors with a Doctor of Science, full-time doctors; Total number of foreign electronic libraries connected to the library of the training institution; Information on doctoral training; total number of doctoral graduates from 2013 to 2015; data on doctoral-level training of the institution during the period of 2013 - 2015; Facilities, equipment, and materials for the training disciplines, etc.

In addition, publicly disclosed contents such as commitments to education quality and actual education quality; conditions ensuring education quality and financial revenue and expenditure must be updated into the public database of the training institution for monitoring and comparison in evaluations (based on Article 12 of Circular 09/2009/TT-BGTVT).

Demonstrating a determination to improve the quality of doctorate degrees in Vietnam, the Ministry of Education and Training resolutely suspends doctoral-level student admissions of training institutions that do not submit reports, do not declare online on time, or whose reports are not truthful.

Official Dispatch 2670 shows initial improvements in enhancing the quality of Vietnamese doctorates. It is hoped that in the future Vietnam will have more reputable universities, attracting more foreign students and having many doctors contributing more to the nation.

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