One of the important tasks set forth by the 2011-2020 education development strategy is to adjust the training major structure, so that vocational schools are capable to receive 30 percent of secondary school graduates by 2020.
However, educators have warned that Vietnam may fail to reach that end.
According to the Ministry of Education and Training, 78 percent of secondary school graduates in the 2011-2012 academic year went studying further at high schools, while only 2 percent went to intermediate schools. The remaining went to vocational schools or went working without experiencing any training courses.
Also in the same year, 46.5 percent of high school graduates went to study at universities and junior colleges, while 22.4 percent went to intermediate and vocational schools.
As such, 350,000 students of both the 2010-2011 and 2011-2012 academic years could not meet the requirements to follow higher education levels.
“It would have been much better if the students had begun going to vocational schools early instead of trying to attend the exams to universities,” a senior official of the Ministry of Education and Training said.
The problem is that the majority of students want to obtain university education and they would only accept to go to vocational schools if they fail the entrance exams to universities.
According to Dr. Do Thi Bich Loan from the Vietnam Education Science Institute, which conducted a survey two years ago, 69 percent of students in Hanoi want to study further at high school after they finish secondary school, while only 2.9 percent wanted to go to intermediate school and 1.8 percent to vocational school.
Another survey, which aimed to find out where the high school graduates from 20 schools in the localities in the northern, central and southern regions would go, found that 97.7 percent of the total 1,737 polled students said they would attend the national university entrance exams.
Especially, 100 percent of the polled students in the provinces of Hung Yen, Thanh Hoa, Quang Nam and Dong Nai said they would attend the national university entrance exams.
Minister of Education and Training Pham Vu Luan also said at a conference that in the thoughts of Vietnamese, university education is the best and the main way for their children to follow, while vocational school is a narrow zigzag path. Therefore, few people go the “vocational school” way.
“Will we ourselves let our children to go to vocational schools? The answer is “no.” Why? Because we feel this is unsafe and not good,” Luan said. “Therefore, the thing that needs to be done to settle the problem is creating a good, safe way for students to go to reach their ends”.
Dr. Le Dong Phuong from the Education Science Institute, while admitting the educators’ failure in giving career guidance to students to help them choose the right ways to go, has blamed the problem to the bad organization of the work.
According to Phuong, high school students are “hungry for information” while they do not receive good advices enough.
He believes that the career guidance activities should be organized for the students from the sixth grade instead of the ninth grade.
