Reason One:
Education is a sector in which everyone considers themselves an expert, so the way quality of education is perceived, evaluated, and expected is very difficult to harmonize and is always accompanied by disagreement.
When you go to eat at a famous restaurant, you eat whatever they sell. There is no such thing as telling them to cook according to your wishes. If you want that, pay a lot more money, or go home to eat. When you get on an airplane, there is no such thing as giving feedback to the pilot on which route to fly faster. You will be asked to step down immediately.
But education is different. No one can touch what “education” looks like in shape, so anyone can consider themselves an expert and offer feedback. Lawyers give feedback on raising children in the lawyer’s way. Police/military officers give feedback on raising children in the military way. Psychology PhDs know only one single area, yet can voice opinions everywhere. There is no scientific basis whatsoever. Extremely subjective! Journalists or KOLs read a lot but are not necessarily deep, yet also become experts, freely loosening their mouths to curse the Ministry, Department, and School as useless. Acting as if every single crime in Vietnamese education could be attributed to that ignorant Minister, Department Director, or Principal.
The origin of arguments in many families is raising children. That is just 1 child and parents already argue boisterously, not to mention grandparents joining in. Yet with 30 children in a classroom that a teacher can handle, it must be said that the teacher is truly a superhero. Every child has a personality, a style, and carries within them so many expectations of father and mother.
Parents who send their children to private schools have money and knowledge, hence many opinions and demands. The school will continuously receive feedback from parents. If consensus is not reached, they post on Facebook to curse, hang banners, call reporters, and report to functional authorities. Any private school lacking courage will be spun like a windmill, going crazy, leaving no time to do well anymore.
Education is not like other service sectors. The person paying for the service is different from the person receiving the service (from preschool to university). The service receiver is the student. Meanwhile, the person paying is precisely the parents. Each subject group has a set of needs and demands that are often completely different.
Preschool students only need to eat well, have sufficient nutrition, sleep on time, be healthy, and be happy. But parents prefer their children to become little geniuses, able to read words, sing with well-shaped mouths, and be clean and fragrant. (Children need to play and get messy, but if parents see their children looking shabby like that, within three days they will transfer schools).
K-12 students find mindset, comprehensive development, having rest time, reading books, playing sports, writing Vietnamese decently, and speaking English clearly to be most important. But parents only want their children to be severely nearsighted, hunchbacked, with scores all above 9, tubby from eating too much, studying from morning to night, and it must be strictly specialized schools and selective classes. College and university students need most to know a trade, live and think independently, critically, and proactively. Working in a restaurant or hotel, or serving at a golf course requires only 3–6 months of study to acquire a good trade and a stable salary. Working as a secretary or sales agent requires only completing intermediate or college level. But parents insist on having a university degree just to satisfy the vanity factor.
Precisely because there is a difference in expectations between students and parents, there will always be tension between the service provider (the education investor) and the payer. Balancing and compromising the interests of these two target groups is by no means an easy task.
Second, doing education is very difficult to scale up.
Meaning one cannot build on a large scale, both regarding teacher training and building physical facilities.
Education is significantly constrained in training high-quality human resources on a large scale.
There is no way to scale up education without teachers. Whenever a school or center is opened, teachers are needed. To have high quality, having good teachers is mandatory.
Training a flight attendant is complex, but takes only 6 months; training an employee in the tourism, restaurant, and hotel industry takes 3–6 months. But to train a teacher who can do the job and teach requires at least 10 years: 3–4 years of university, 2 years of practice, and 4 years of experience to be considered mature enough to teach.
Being a doctor is the most complex profession, but a doctor has many auxiliary medical devices, with nurses and caregivers assisting all around. People also do not get sick all year round. Therefore, the required number of doctors is not as excessively large as teachers.
Whereas in education, the teacher is the primary service provider, while the school outside is the facility supporting logistics. Where then can good teachers be found to scale up? People cannot “copy” the emotion, enthusiasm, and wisdom of a teacher. No matter how good the machinery and content are, without the soul of a teacher, they are meaningless. Therefore, it is very difficult to mass-train teachers like a machine. That is a major reason why it is very difficult to scale up education.
Vietnam’s obsession with Westerners (actually a form of implicit racial discrimination) also exacerbates the shortage of good teachers. Education is perhaps the most conservative sector when it comes to accepting Vietnamese personnel to replace foreigners. As long as it claims high quality and international standards, it must strictly be “white” Westerners. Meanwhile, who knows where to find those white Western men and women with good pedagogical skills?
With the salary level meant for a single Westerner, we could invite 3 Vietnamese teachers of much higher quality. A Westerner’s salary is usually from 40–60 million VND/month (for them to have enough to live and rent a house, which is fair enough). But if a young, talented Vietnamese teacher can receive a salary of 15–20 million VND/month, that is already very good.
Precisely the difference between expectations of students on one side and parents on the other side further exacerbates this issue. For students, anyone can teach as long as it is interesting and they like it. But parents insist on white Westerners to feel at ease. A few years ago, the Ho Chi Minh City Department of Education and Training had a program to hire Filipino teachers to teach English. Yet they were criticized relentlessly.
We deployed teaching Math and Science in English using digital technology and Vietnamese teachers nationwide, but initial deployment was extremely difficult because most Departments were obsessed with having to use Westerners. Certain Departments of Education and Training to this day still insist that there must be Westerners before allowing the international program to be deployed. It strictly must be British or American to look prestigious. (Regarding this matter alone, I particularly respect the Hanoi Department of Education and Training for never having these nonsensical demands).
Third difficulty:
When scaling up education, capital is always lacking, and land policy for education is overly poor, making investment in education terrifyingly expensive.
Most educational enterprises do not possess many fixed assets. Vietnamese banks are very hesitant to lend without pledged fixed assets as security. Most business owners put out personal savings or personal houses to pledge as collateral. To develop big requires capital, but the financial capability of Vietnamese educational enterprises is usually very small.
The Vietnamese government always talks about supporting education, but in reality, that is not entirely true. Even though corporate income tax when investing in education is 10%, accessing capital for any educational enterprise without a supporting foundation (capital, relationships) behind it is as difficult as plucking stars from the sky.
Land allocation policy aiming to encourage investment in education also fattens up initial speculators. The government grants land for education but does not establish criteria for a specific implementation deadline, so in many places, land for education carries sky-high prices.
In Hanoi and HCMC, there are currently very many land funds reserved for education, but all have long been staked out by people “intending to do education.” They just leave them soaking there for 5–10 years without doing anything. Land prices keep increasing, causing investment costs in private K-12 education to increase horrifyingly. To build a proper school requires at least 1 hectare of land. Calculating the price at 5–10 million VND/m², 1 hectare of land alone swallows up nearly 100 billion VND.
Doing real estate allows stacking apartments, cramming density to resell and recover capital, but doing education- who would dare to do so. Going near the West Lake area or new urban areas, there are places where educational land prices go up to 10–15 million VND/m². Thus, those project creators who build nothing, just sitting and waiting for 5–10 years, automatically possess a tremendous asset worth up to hundreds of billions VND. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of students lack classrooms.
The government should have imposed a specific deadline forcing investors to build; if they do not build, the land must be re-auctioned or reassigned to someone who commits to building within a specific timeframe. This is one of the worst inadequacies regarding policies encouraging educational investment in Vietnam right now. “Some feast while others starve” regarding land reserved for education.
Buying a piece of land is already expensive like that. Money to build up to proper standards is also by no means cheap. On average, building a school of about 1–2 hectares will cost from 150–300 billion VND. Thus, before doing anything, 250–400 billion VND has gone up in smoke. Ask how many years it will take to recover the capital?
Assuming a profit of 30 billion VND/year, it requires 12 years from the moment that profit level is reached for the school to recover its capital (an investment of 300 billion VND). With a profit of 30 billion VND, the school’s revenue must reach at least 200 billion VND/year (assuming a profit margin of 15%, which is an extremely good level). With a revenue level of 200 billion VND/year and tuition of 200 million VND/year (including all expenses for meals, studying, transportation, etc.), 1,000–1,200 students are required.
Building a school is nothing like doing real estate, where upon finishing the foundation almost everything can be sold. As for K-12 schools or universities? Just wait. At least 7–10 years to reach a capacity of 1,000 students, if done super-bly. In the first year of opening, recruiting 200 students is already skilled. Increasing by another 100–200 students each year is already outstanding. Not to mention geographical location, where there might not be enough students enrolling with a population pyramid aging like this. Therefore, it takes 15 years to break even. With 200–300 billion VND, buying land or real estate would probably yield higher profits.
In Hanoi, there is Alpha School, famous for the model where parents must take an exam for their children to be admitted. Now having nearly 1,200 students, it also struggled for 8 years with so much bitterness to reach this number of students.
Therefore, please do not blame tuition fees at private schools and international schools in Vietnam for being dizzyingly high, on par with tuition at top private schools in the US. Because basic investment is horrifyingly expensive like that!
Nguyen Quoc Toan
Final Part: The Weaknesses of Those Who Carry the Vocation of Education
Part 1: Education Has Never Been Super-Profitable
