Western degrees a let-down for Vietnamese

I wish I can read this book. The author’s concern for the graduate returnees’ employment and earnings triggered my curiosity. Is there any comparison between the oversea returnees’ employment status and the home educated graduates’ both in short-term (less than three years since graduation) and in long-term (5 years or over)? Is there any analysis of patents’ influence on the Vietnamese students’ choice of overseas education and destination afterwards? Presumably the parents who can afford their children studying at Western university for 3-4 years are not average parents in a developing county.

Hi Helen, thanks for your comment and questions. The study did not set out to compare between home-educated and overseas-educated graduates. However, this issue came up frequently during the interviews. The general views were that home-educated graduates had the benefits of local industry knowledge and most importantly personal connections. Overseas-educated had better work-related skills like problem solving, lateral thinking and most importantly English skills. They also had very high expectation of salary compared with home-educated graduates which also led to their choice of managerial jobs with MNCs. The perception was that if work-related skills and English skills can be taught well in Vietnamese higher education institutions, then overtime, the appeal of overseas-educated will be diminished. The benefits of international education were also more apparent for those that had been back less than 3 years compared with those who had been back for a while. In other words, the longer the person was in employment, the less they could leverage benefits of overseas education. In fact, this finding was consistent among returning graduates and employers. There was significant parental influence on the choice of host countries, particularly for undergraduates. Australia tended to be chosen when there were existing families (diaspora) living in Australia. In contrast, the US, and European countries were country of choice even if they had no family connections. This maybe because of the campus environment in these countries which is different to Australia where students usually live very far away from campus. Similarly, all participants in this study chose to return to Vietnam for family reason and scholarship conditions. The study’s participants’ demographic background indicated that they were from high socioeconomic background. But it would not be incorrect to say that most Vietnamese families irrespective of wealth would exhaust all means to secure financial resources to provide an overseas education for their children. The study also concerned with returning graduates’ civic engagement and higher education teaching. The findings were similar in terms of skills and structural mismatch. If you are interested in reading the book, I could send you a chapter that this story was based on. Please send me an email to lienph1@gmail.com.