Vietnam will have a surplus of over 70,000 teacher training students.

Vietnam will have a surplus of about 70,100 teacher training students, forcing us to find solutions for effective investment in what is considered the noblest profession.

By 2020, it is expected that Vietnam will have a surplus of about 70,100 teacher training graduates (41,000 teachers for primary school, 12,200 for secondary school and 16,900 for high school). This means that they will have difficulty finding jobs in teaching.

That is the information given at the National Scientific Conference on teacher training at multidisciplinary universities, meeting the current requirements of educational innovation, recently held in Hanoi.

Nearly 20 years ago, schools across the country were severely lacking in both quantity and quality of teachers. During the recruitment season for primary school teachers, Ho Chi Minh City had to set a passing score of 6.5/20 for candidates in the inner city and 3.5/20 for candidates from the suburbs, with less than 20% of the test scores achieving a total score of 10/20.

Faced with that crisis, implementing the "National Program on building a team of teachers and pedagogical schools 1995 - 2000", the Ministry of Education and Training decided to exempt tuition fees for students studying Pedagogy.

The years 1996-1997 were considered the “golden” period of the pedagogical industry, when the Ministry of Education and Training introduced a tuition-free policy for students enrolling in this industry. That encouragement led to many good and excellent students “enlisting” in pedagogical schools every time the university entrance exam came.

Pedagogical college students (illustrative photo)

Competition to enter the teaching profession has reached its peak, with one year, candidates to enter the Mathematics department of Hanoi National University of Education had to score 27 or 28 points for 3 subjects.

However, in recent years, the benchmark for entering the teaching profession has not been as high and is gradually decreasing. The recruitment and remuneration mechanism still has many shortcomings and limitations, causing many excellent graduates not to choose the teaching profession.

Meanwhile, many localities have not paid special attention to training pedagogical students to meet the needs of society. The forecast of supply and demand for human resources does not "meet" each other, which is also the reason why every year tens of thousands of students graduating from pedagogical schools are unemployed or switch to other jobs.

In fact, the budget for implementing the tuition-free policy for teacher training students is not small. Currently, in addition to a number of multidisciplinary schools that provide teacher training, the country has 13 teacher training universities, 1 education university and 33 teacher training colleges.

Although in recent years, the Ministry of Education and Training has acknowledged the surplus of teachers and set regulations to gradually reduce teacher training quotas, in reality, the amount of budget funds used to subsidize tuition fees for teacher training schools has increased steadily every year.

According to reports from budget planning conferences of the Ministry of Education and Training, in 2011, of the more than 4,000 billion VND budget spent on education, the estimated tuition compensation for teacher training colleges under the Ministry of Education and Training according to the tuition framework stipulated in Decree 49 alone was nearly 250 billion VND.

By 2012, the total actual tuition compensation from the budget for teacher training colleges under the Ministry of Education and Training had increased to more than 354 billion VND. By 2013, the Ministry of Education and Training's estimate of the budget for tuition compensation for teacher training students at universities and colleges and tuition exemptions increased to more than 440 billion VND, and in 2014, the budget allocated for this task increased to more than 484 billion VND.

Changing state investment in education?

The estimated number of surplus pedagogical students in Vietnam by 2020 makes us wonder about the waste of the State budget for tuition exemption for students studying in this field.

Mr. Nguyen Van Tuyen, Principal of Hanoi Pedagogical University II, said that in 1996-1997, the Government exempted tuition fees for students of pedagogical schools, which attracted a large number of excellent students to take the entrance exam. The graduating students of this course all had good qualifications and skills.

However, nowadays, people's lives are more and more developed, it is completely possible to provide a few hundred thousand for children's tuition.

Up to now, free tuition is no longer a big motivation to attract students to pedagogical schools, but there needs to be a "stronger" solution such as: pedagogical students are exempted from tuition, given scholarships, free accommodation and upon graduation are assigned jobs immediately like students of police and military schools.

Meanwhile, Prof. Dr. Dinh Quang Bao, former senior researcher at the Institute of Pedagogical Research (Hanoi National University of Education), expressed his opinion that if the country wants to train high-quality human resources, it must have good teachers. Therefore, we still have to have a policy to attract good students to "enlist" in pedagogical schools.

As it is now, equalizing investment in free tuition for all students will not attract talented people, nor will it create motivation to improve the training quality of teacher training schools.

Therefore, the total budget investment for each pedagogical school should not be reduced but should be calculated to increase the investment rate per student rather than spreading that budget out.

“Assuming that the current budget for Hanoi National University of Education is 100 billion VND per year for 2,000 full-time university students, the investment rate per student should be increased. Thus, the total investment will not decrease, but the budget will only be for 1,000 students,” Mr. Dinh Quang Bao shared.

This is also a solution to help improve the quality of training, attract good students, and reduce the quota in a substantial way. Because, although the Ministry of Education and Training has a policy to reduce the quota for teacher training due to a surplus of teachers, some schools still resist this trend because the funding is still poured on the students' heads./.

According to VOV