Vietnam should limit excessive number of PhDs, say education experts The ‘PhD inflation’ is the hottest topic on education forums these days. MOET is now compiling new regulations on PhD training with an aim to improve training quality.   The expression ‘PhD inflation’ has never been used by MOET or state management agencies, but it is common among the public. Pham Tat Dong, deputy chair of the Vietnam Study Encouragement Society, said PhD inflation exists for several reasons. First, Vietnam doesn’t have a long-term training plan. For example, no agency comes forward and conducts research to find out how many PhDs and master's degrees Vietnam will need for every major from now to 2020. Second, training quality is problematic. Many PhDs have been found incapable.  The expression ‘PhD inflation’ has never been used by MOET or state management agencies, but it is common among the public.  Some newspapers quoted sources as reporting that Vietnam has 24,000 PhDs, commenting that while there are numerous PhDs, the country is still poor. The Ministry of Science and Technology has denied there are 24,000 Doctors of Philosophy which was published in newspapers and said the country has only 12,000 PhDs working and researching in the technology & sciences sector. However, the confirmation by the ministry has not changed people’s viewpoints about PhD training in Vietnam. A member of an education forum commented that the requirements of PhDs seem to have been lowered so that more and more people can become PhDs. He said that the requirement lowering is the only explanation to the question about why there are so many PhDs and the Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences (VASS) alone can produce 350 PhDs a year. Meanwhile, Do Khanh Vinh, director of VASS, affirmed that with the existing facilities and staff, the institute is capable of producing more than 350 PhDs. Regarding training quality, Dong said there are still many problems. “MOET stipulates that one professor can only guide a certain number of postgraduates, but it does not know the real number,” Dong said. “One professor trains tens of masters and PhDs within several years,” he said. The second problem, according to Dong, is that the members of the assessment councils do not have deep knowledge about the issues mentioned in dissertations. This is simply because they were trained in other majors. In many cases, the professors who mark dissertations don’t spend much time on the work. This is attributed to the low pay offered by the state to professors. Under the regulations set by MOET, 10 percent of dissertations will be checked again at random. However, analysts said that this will not help ensure dissertations’ quality, because big problems may lie in the remaining 90 percent of dissertations. PLVN