Public Policies for Vietnam's Private Higher Education. Increasing yet Inconsistent and Incomplete Departures from Statism

This chapter analyzes how the Vietnamese state uses public policies to govern private higher education (PHE) in Vietnam. Using Levy’s four-governance model framework, we find that although the state has generally loosened its control over the private sector, this departure from the statist model has never been linear or complete. In general, the state’s policy approach tends to vary significantly across sectors and governance aspects (e.g., authorization, academic matters, finance, and leadership selection). While some policies retain statism even for PHE (e.g., licensing), others move decidedly toward the pluralist-market pole, even for the public sector (e.g., leadership selection). However, most policies fall between these two poles: The state delegates decision-making authority to universities while remaining the chief rule-maker. In addition, our analysis reveals that although many policies appear sector-neutral by design, their implementation often varies across sectors, usually disfavoring the private one. Likewise, public policies have different impacts on different subsectors and forms, although such variations are not necessarily by design. Notable is Vietnam’s unusual predominance of legally for-profit over nonprofit private universities. Overall, while the longitudinal thrust pushes toward pluralist-market dynamics, the party-state regime retains ultimate authority to determine the extent of such dynamics, deciding when and how much to depart from statism.