Education graduates who find employment in their field will have their student loan repayments waived.

This is the proposed amendment to the Education Law regarding the policy of tuition fee exemption for teacher training students, which will be submitted to the National Assembly for discussion in the upcoming session.

The Ministry of Education and Training stated that, due to changes in the labor market, a large number of teacher training graduates nationwide are unemployed or working in fields unrelated to education. This situation, where graduates work in unrelated fields, results in a significant waste of human resources invested in education.

Therefore, the draft does not stipulate tuition fee exemption for teacher training students, but instead provides a teacher training credit loan policy: teacher training students can borrow teacher training credit to pay tuition fees and living expenses throughout their course of study, and are entitled to scholarships to encourage learning, tuition fee exemptions and reductions, and social allowances as prescribed.

After graduation, if you work in the education sector for the required period, you will not have to repay your teacher training loan.

Teacher training students can borrow money to pay tuition fees. If they graduate and work in their field, this loan will be forgiven.

The Ministry of Education and Training stated that this new policy offers several advantages: Students can borrow credit to cover tuition fees and living expenses, allowing them to focus on their studies. After graduation, if they work in the teaching profession, the loan will be forgiven; thus, if they work in the teaching field after graduation, students will not have to pay tuition fees.

For teacher training colleges, students pay full tuition fees to the school according to the fee schedule, and the school has a direct source of revenue to proactively cover its expenses.

According to leaders of the Ministry of Education and Training, the State will provide support to the right recipients, eliminating the situation where financial support is provided to those trained in pedagogy but who then work in other professions after graduation, thus preventing the support policy from being effective.

Schools are free to set their own tuition fees.

The draft Education Law also amends the current regulations on tuition fees. Accordingly, it allows non-public educational institutions to proactively set tuition fees to ensure they cover their costs.

Public educational institutions provide high-quality educational services and proactively set tuition fees accordingly.

At the same time, to curb the arbitrary increase in tuition fees by private and high-quality educational institutions, the draft adds a regulation requiring these institutions to publicly disclose training costs, tuition fees, and tuition fee collection schedules for the entire course and level of education.

The Ministry of Education and Training stated that, previously, tuition fees were a type of fee belonging to the state budget. The mechanism for collecting, managing, and using tuition fees was implemented according to the Ordinance on Fees and Charges, whereby tuition fees had to be recorded as revenue and expenditure in the state budget and had to be deposited into the state treasury for monitoring and management as prescribed.

However, in 2015, the National Assembly enacted the Law on Fees and Charges, which removed tuition fees from the list of fees and charges managed by the state, and considered tuition fees as the price of education and training services.

Accordingly, tuition fees are regulated by the Law on Prices, and the mechanism for collecting, managing, and using tuition fees has been shifted to a service pricing mechanism as stipulated in the Law on Prices, and must be calculated accurately and comprehensively. Therefore, the regulations on tuition fees need to be amended to conform with the Law on Prices.