What are the 24,000 Vietnamese PhDs doing?  The majority of Vietnamese PhDs do not follow scientific research or work as school lecturers. The latest report of the Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) showed that 633 PhDs now work as the lecturers at junior colleges (3-year training), while 8,519 as the lecturers at universities nationwide. Prior to that, Vietnam announced it has had 24,300 PhDs. What are the other 15,000 PhDs then? The high ranking officials at state agencies   If counting the Vietnamese PhDs with the ranks of deputy minister and higher, one would see that the number is five times higher than in Japan, according to Dr. Nguyen Khac Hung, a former specialist of the National Academy of Public Administration, once said when mentioning the story about the eight provinces’ heads who gave wrong reports about the toll from the 2012 natural calamities. Sometime ago, Hanoi made public its personnel development strategy, under which the capital city’s 100 percent of officials of governmental institutions belonging to the city’s committee of the Party would have doctorate by 2020. By that time, 100 percent of the city’s people’s committee’s officials would have postgraduate education levels, while 50 percent of them have doctorate. 100 percent of key personnel at local authorities (commune and ward people’s committees) would have university education. A lot of PhDs now work as the CEOs of the state owned economic groups or general corporations, or the businessmen of private companies. It is obvious that for the PhDs, making scientific research is not their main work for now. Vietnam is among the countries with the highest numbers of PhDs, but it is among the countries with the lowest number of scientific research works in South East Asia. International reports have pointed out that Vietnamese have few recognized inventions and scientific research works published on the world’s prestigious journals. Dr. Pham Bich San, Deputy Secretary General of VUSTA, the union of scientific associations, noted that though Vietnam has most PhDs in South East Asia, none of its school has been listed among the world’s 500 top universities. According to the Ministry of Science and Technology (MST), Vietnam has 24,300 PhDs and 101,000 masters. The figures represent the increase of 7 percent and 14 percent per annum, respectively. The impersonated PhDs A lot of managers of state owned enterprises and the heads of state agencies have recently been found by local newspapers as having counterfeit degrees. In June 2010, local people felt surprised when hearing that Nguyen Ngoc An, the then Director of the Phu Tho provincial Department of Culture, Sports and Tourism, had a doctorate granted by the US South Pacific University. Later, local newspapers found that the university was just a “degree-mill” in the US, one of the 21 education institutions unrecognized by the US competent agencies. Nguyen Van Ngoc, the former Deputy Secretary General of Yen Bai provincial Party Committee, has been found as obtaining the doctorate from the same school after paying $17,000. Duong Chi Dung is a special well-known PhD. After finishing high schools, Dung went to Germany in late 1980s as an export worker. After returning to Vietnam in 1994, he attended the in-service training courses to obtain bachelor, master degrees and then doctorate. The doctor of economics now faces the death sentence for the wrongdoings he made when working as Chair of Vinalines, the shipping corporation. Chi Mai, VietNamNet Bridge