"To improve the quality of training, it is necessary to have adequate investment resources"

At this time, one of the issues that public opinion inside and outside the education sector is interested in is the Ministry of Education and Training's proposal of the Project on innovation of financial mechanisms in education and training for the period 2009-2-14. Prof. Dr. Nguyen Van Khanh - President of the University of Social Sciences and Humanities - had a conversation with the Education and Times newspaper about the main contents of this Project (Education and Times newspaper, issue 63, published on May 16, 2009):

Improving the quality of training requires investment resources, resources must be proportional to quality, specifically here it is necessary to have adequate investment funding. Especially in some key scientific fields, in the orientation of reaching regional and international standards, it is necessary to pay more attention to innovation, facilities and equipment need to meet training requirements, international cooperation also needs to be expanded.

Reality shows that in the past time, to be exact, the past 11 years, tuition fees have remained the same while prices, living conditions, and people's incomes have all increased, which is unreasonable. While the state budget is limited, mobilizing people's strength and mobilizing learners' contributions within the allowed limits is absolutely necessary. This is not only beneficial for the common cause, but also for learners and meeting the high-quality human resources required by society.

Without comparing with other developed countries, I can cite examples like in China, the economic conditions are more developed than ours, but the government does not bear all the burden of training costs. They also mobilize students to pay, currently their average tuition fee is about 5000 Yuan/student/year, equivalent to 14 million VND/student/year. In Vietnam, it is only 1.8 million VND/student/year, which is completely unreasonable.

When the resources from the State budget are not enough, and the revenue from tuition fees is too low, it is impossible to talk about improving the quality of training. Where is the money to upgrade facilities and spend on activities to improve the quality of training? For example, in my school, a young lecturer who has taught for 2-3 years has a salary of only 1.5 million - 1.7 million VND/month, and a new graduate only gets 1.4 million VND/month. With such a salary, they only have enough to rent a temporary house to live in and eat "street food", let alone reinvest, improve qualifications, capacity...

Increasing tuition fees is necessary, we need to understand that only by increasing tuition fees can we have more funding to improve the quality of training. In my opinion, the Project on financial mechanism innovation has solved a long-standing problem in schools. The University of Social Sciences and Humanities is a school with many students under the policy regime, each year the school has to compensate up to 2 billion VND for this. To get that amount of money, it is certain that training costs, research costs, and staff training costs must be cut. This is a long-standing inequality, so ordinary students also have to bear the training costs for students under the policy regime that the state should pay. Now, according to the content of the Project, the above unreasonableness has been resolved, the state is responsible for paying the budget exemptions for students under the policy regime. As for increasing tuition fees by 50% in professional schools this school year, in my opinion, it is reasonable and completely acceptable. In fact, the increase can be up to 70%, even double, to partly offset the training costs and improve the income of staff and lecturers. But stopping at only 50% is a very careful calculation by the State so that schools have more revenue to improve the quality of training, while learners can accept it - this is the Humanity of the Project.

•According to Education & Times