This has been an ongoing issue in Vietnam. I taught in Vietnam at a teacher training college four years back. Most of my students who attended had no aim to bec

This has been an ongoing issue in Vietnam. I taught in Vietnam at a teacher training college four years back. Most of my students who attended had no aim to become teachers: they instead wanted to work as tour guides or translators or gain a standard white-collar office job in international business. Their reasoning was that it was too hard to become a teacher--too many applicants for too few spots. (And besides, the pay was terrible.) The comments on 2 years of Marxist ideology are very exaggerated, but there is a general truth in that there's a large mismatch between the education and the outcome for university students. Vietnam would do well to encourage skills-building instead of limiting studies to professional tracks where job prospects are limited and theory is of no use.