In Vietnam, the Best Education Can Lead to Worse Job Prospects | Hacker News Reader

In Vietnam, the Best Education Can Lead to Worse Job Prospects

bloomberg.com

I did an "internship" in Thai Nguyen University of Technology in 2012.

The second sentence of the article captures the first part of the problem: a tutor or professor earned ~250$/month back then, and scamming tourists in Hanoi required basic knowledge of English and some street smart and earned you four times as much.

The second part of the problem was that the university was just not very good, students were basically playing Age of Empires (yay!) all day long. It was completely different from the pretty decent European university I'd attended before the internship.

Going there was one of the best experiences of my life, I might add, but I can see why companies are reluctant to pay extra for this kind of education.

"In university, we only received heavy theoretical training and a lot of Ho Chi Minh’s ideology with communist party history"

"its colleges and universities are failing to prepare youth for more complex work"

This is the future for the US too ;-)

From what I can tell this is the US today.

I support what you said--higher ed in the US is kind of a shell of its former self, not on par with Ho Chi Min or whatever, but the rampant infusion of PC ideology has wrecked rational dialog.

Wait, your argument is that PC culture has wrecked all rational discourse? In all cases, at every University? I do see cases where what you would refer to as 'PC ideology' has eschewed rational discourse with cleverly disguised emotionally charged discourse. But to say that PC culture has unilaterally reduced the value of college to near zero, is quite a stretch.

Agreed, U.S. higher ed has been somewhat emptied of its thought diversity, in my own experience.

This has been an ongoing issue in Vietnam. I taught in Vietnam at a teacher training college four years back. Most of my students who attended had no aim to become teachers: they instead wanted to work as tour guides or translators or gain a standard white-collar office job in international business. Their reasoning was that it was too hard to become a teacher--too many applicants for too few spots. (And besides, the pay was terrible.)

The comments on 2 years of Marxist ideology are very exaggerated, but there is a general truth in that there's a large mismatch between the education and the outcome for university students. Vietnam would do well to encourage skills-building instead of limiting studies to professional tracks where job prospects are limited and theory is of no use.

There is nothing that says education will necessarily lead to better job prospects. It's simply supply and demand.

Vietnam had a population explosion in the past few decades and there are tons of young grads flooding the market. If the economy can't produce enough jobs for the supply of educated people, then they will face lower wages and worse prospects.

For example, if there is 1 job opening for a cashier and you have a choice of hiring a high school grad or a college grad, you choose the high school grad because you know they will stick around longer while the college grad will leave the first chance he gets.

In this scenario, the college grad has worse prospects than the less educated high school grad.

So then the question is why isn't the nation/economy producing more jobs/opportunities/etc for its educated young adults? Is it a structural issue? Is it monetary/financial/investment issue? Is it legal/tax related?

Vietnamese here, can discuss some insights (although haven't visited my country since mid-2015, and later knowledge comes from reading local news, talking to friends, etc. so take any information here with a grain of salt).

Unlike many countries, typical Vietnamese people have a strong obsession with working in the public sector / government-based employments, which basically guarantees lifetime employment and not too much of work pressure. Naturally, tons of people apply for such positions, and corruption/bribery inevitably occurs.

This is one example of how people applying for public job (article in Vietnamese, but the photo speaks for itself)

http://us.24h.com.vn/tin-tuc-trong-ngay/phoi-nang-treo-tuong...

Right now the public sector is under severe criticism for underpaying, overstaffing and inefficiency. There are proposals of cutting 30 percent of staffs, but bureaucracy moves slowly, and naturally you won't expect the job prospect in this sector change overnight.

How about the private sector (say startup)? In the last 10 years there have been tremendous progress, but their scale are still small compared to public (I'm talking about Vietnamese-owned companies, foreign-owned companies like Citibank or Uber are a different matter). Vietnam is still very early game in capitalistic economic model, with infrastructure (transportation, electronic payment, law) years behind developed countries. Simply put, the condition to operate private companies in Vietnam hasn't been fully fleshed out yet. With time there will be explosive growth in this sector, but for now, the government is still a huge beast.

This was India about a couple of decades back at the beginning of economic liberalization. Give it time. Sucks for those in the present but changes rapidly

>Give it time.

Now think, where are all those public sector workers? Probably regretting big their decisions at the start of their careers.

Right now, people who go into industry right out of the school have huge opportunity. Low competition, low barriers for entry. By the time the private sector economy will pass the inflection point, and be making good money, people who choose work in private enterprises will be years ahead of the competition.

Check on how Russian IT industry rose up. Back in mid-noughties, a typical IT worker/software dev was either a high-schooler, self-taught person, or "studied botanics, but ended up in IT" type graduate. Barriers for entry were pretty much non-existent, there were nobody to push back at hiring such people with their "authoritative opinion." When the economy finally went belly up in 2014, people with ~50k incomes in hard currency suddenly became big men and among them were many people from IT. Many of such people started their own shops. Now, Russian companies have luxury to hire people with PhD level education for intern level position, because the crowd that was going into banking/lawyer/MBA/statesmanship finally turned to IT.

Getting a good job in Vietnam requires paying somebody off, often to the tune of $10k - $20k, which is a lot of money for most Vietnamese. Your diploma is next to irrelevant.

You can get away from the Ho Chi Minh studies if you goto certain foreign tertiary institutions. The problem with those places is that the degrees they offer are probably more useless than what you would get at a Vietnamese public university and are mostly what we would consider to be technical college degrees.

Nobody, absolutely nobody, has a greater interest in and responsibility for your education than yourself.

In today's world, the only people most of us can blame for our poor education is ourselves. Most of what I learned, I learned after leaving the university system. If anything, what my formal education did was to provide me with the skills to acquire knowledge on my own and also instill in me the desire and confidence to do so. The present day world which provides us with MOOCs, Wikipedia, freely available books from every corner of the world and from every era, ability to hold discussions with like-minded learners from every part of the world, etc., are all extremely conducive to self-education. It's a terrible shame to let this golden opportunity go to waste.

Perhaps it was your university experience that prepared you to be a lifelong learner?

Looking back, I can't claim that my university experience had anything much to do with it. It was a realization that I came to by myself: if you want to learn anything, the only person you can really depend on is yourself. Once the will to uplift yourself is there, especially in this age, you will find the materials and the resources along the way.

Poor educational system is something that India suffers from too. I think the best antidote to it is to evangelize the idea of self-learning even well after you have left the formal educational system.

Doesn't check out because university generally doesn't provide job-related skills. You need internships and part-time jobs for that.

Doesn't help when high value jobs are not created in the first place.

Nonsense. Plenty of what a good university course teaches you is relevant to employment: analysing information, writing reports, managing time on projects, collaborating with others. The specific modules and topics might or might not be relevant to your eventual job, but plenty of what your learn will be.

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