The extraordinary backstory gracing what may be Vietnam’s most aspirational university exemplifies the new educational models taking shape in a crowded South-east Asian country perched at an economic and demographic crossroads.

�Ჹ�ԴǾ�’s VinUniversity is one of the many subsidiaries of Vingroup, Vietnam’s largest private conglomerate, whose activities – shopping malls, hotels, resorts, residential developments, e-commerce, renewable energy, electric vehicles, high-speed rail, robotics, artificial intelligence and cybersecurity, as well as non-profit schools, hospitals and charitable foundations – have their genesis in Mivina instant noodles, a household name in Ukraine.

Founder Pham Nhat Vuong, who had studied in Moscow, established his Technocom food production business in Kharkiv in 1993. He sold it to Nestlé in 2010 and returned to his native Vietnam as the country’s richest person. His philanthropic efforts since then have included plunging 6,500 Vietnamese dong (£182 million) into non-profit VinUni in 2019.

The fledgling university, said to be the world’s first higher-education institution with a one-word name, shares its founder’s aspirational zeal. Highly selective – its students average 1,480 out of a perfect 1,600 in the Scholastic Aptitude Test, it says – it boasts a student-staff ratio of just 11 to one and plans to expand its 2,000-odd enrolments to 3,500 by the end of the decade.

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Scholarships are , ranging to full coverage of fees and living costs, and the 30 per cent or so of undergraduates aiming for postgraduate study are eagerly accepted at top overseas institutions. The university, which teaches exclusively in English, has forged partnerships with Cornell University, the University of Pennsylvania and in Singapore.

It is now transforming itself from a teaching-intensive to a research-intensive institution, with aspirations to by 2030. Vingroup has committed up to $372 million (£274 million) more to the “phase 2 strategy”, which includes a scheme to recruit 10 celebrated scholars, 200 full-time research leaders, 200 early career researchers and 100 affiliates.

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The university promises “globally competitive remuneration” and personal development grants for every recruit, along with up to $1 million in seed funding for research, according to Le Mai Lan, president of the university and vice-president of Vingroup. The first wave of recruitment for early career researchers attracted about 160 applicants. Five were accepted.

“We are new, we are ambitious and we have a very clear purpose,” Mai Lan said. “We want to find a recipe to develop talents, changemakers, thinkers. It’s not about quantity. It’s…about the right people [with] aspiration and capabilities, who want to make things happen and [will] not give up.”

The purpose is to build “core tech” in Vietnam – an “economic rising star”, with the 33rd largest gross domestic product in the world and the highest growth rate of any top-50 economy, according to the International Monetary Fund. But home-grown intellectual property contributes little to the country’s exports, Mai Lan said. “We should not focus on cheap labour. We should focus on building our own core technologies.”

Despite Vietnam’s immense cultural respect for education, parents think quality higher education can only be obtained overseas. The country sends more students abroad than any other South-east Asian nation, at a cost of some $4 billion a year. “I don’t know how many tonnes of rice or shrimps you have to…export to [earn] that much money,” Mai Lan said.

The demographic conditions that have helped fuel Vietnam’s growth, a working age population as its dependent age groups, are tailing off. Vietnam’s population in as little as 20 years, projections suggest. The median age could reach 50 in half a century, up from about 34 now.

Vietnamese universities have a “dual” mission of educating young people on one hand, while “upskilling” established workers on the other, according to Ngoc Ninh Nguyen. The gross enrolment rate at tertiary level has been “very low” for decades. “A lot of…people in the workforce didn’t have a chance to attend university.”

Phenikaa University, where Nguyen is vice-president of global outreach, has a backstory not dissimilar to VinUniversity’s. But its trajectory is very different. It boasts 35,000 students, up from a few hundred in 2017 before its founder Ho Xuan Nang – a former academic who heads Phenikaa Group, another huge Vietnamese corporation – acquired and rebranded the then Thanh Tay University on �Ჹ�ԴǾ�’s outskirts.

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Since then, Nang’s support has driven the institution from strength to strength. It has spawned a semiconductor training centre and a university hospital and claims 115 patents and nine spin-offs. They include , which is developing autonomous robots, drones and minibuses in a “smart mini-city” on the campus.

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The university was declared a model for “new-generation private universities” by Vietnam’s then prime minister Phạm Minh Chính, according to . It claimed top prize in this year’s ����Vlog Asia Awards.

Phenikaa’s approach is to use experiential learning to tap the “unheeded potential” of its students, Nguyen said. “Students have to touch, to try, to experience the world with all the senses that they’ve got.” Individually, the 35,000 students might make “small contributions”, but their “concerted effort…would be great for Vietnam. Our society needs innovations to transform the way people are living.”

Transport engineer Tu Anh Trinh said Vietnam’s universities also had a role in combating an “environment crisis” directly impacting the country’s south, as upstream damming of the Mekong River upset the ecological balance of the delta and threatened to inundate a region the size of the Netherlands.

UEH University, where Trinh is the head of the s�ܲ��ٲ����Բ����������ٲ����Ǵڴھ�����, has transformed itself from an institution focused squarely on economics – and, for periods, under other institutions’ control – into a magnet for multidisciplinarity and sustainable development. THE now ranks it as the country’s top university.

Vietnamese institutions must adopt an “open mindset” rather than relying on their history of “success in the past”, Trinh said. “No university can be number one forever.”

Vietnamese technology corporations FPT and CMC have also established their own universities. Mai Lan said academic freedom was not threatened by such arrangements, insisting that corporate overseers like Vingroup were not interested in circumscribing staff’s activities.

“Do they need people who comply…and do whatever [they] are told? Or [do] they need people who think and then co-create the next Vietnam, or the next Vingroup?”

Nguyen said universities needed to be “closer to the society in any way they can. [When] businessmen understand the dynamics of traditional academia…that is an opportunity rather than an obstacle.”

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john.ross@timeshighereducation.com