Impacts of school resources on training outcome a case study on three southern universities supervised by MOIT

UNIVERSITY OF ECONOMICS ERASMUS UNVERSITY ROTTERDAM HO CHI MINH CITY VIETNAM INSTITUTE OF SOCIAL STUDIES THE NETHERLANDS VIETNAM – THE NETHERLANDS PROGRAMME FOR M.A IN DEVELOPMENT ECONOMICS IMPACTS OF SCHOOL RESOURCES ON TRAINING OUTCOME: A CASE STUDY ON THREE SOUTHERN UNIVERSITIES SUPERVISED BY MOIT BY VO XUAN DUC MASTER OF ARTS IN DEVELOPMENT ECONOMICS HO CHI MINH CITY, July 2016 UNIVERSITY OF ECONOMICS INSTITUTE OF SOCIAL STUDIES HO CHI MINH CITY THE HAGUE VIETNAM THE NETHERLANDS VIETNAM - NETHERLANDS PROGRAMME FOR M.A IN DEVELOPMENT ECONOMICS IMPACTS OF SCHOOL RESOURCES ON TRAINING OUTCOME: A CASE STUDY ON THREE SOUTHERN UNIVERSITIES SUPERVISED BY MOIT A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS IN DEVELOPMENT ECONOMICS By VO XUAN DUC Academic Supervisor: Dr NGUYEN HUU DUNG HO CHI MINH CITY, July 2016 CERTIFICATION “I certify this thesis has not been submitted for other degrees I certify my best ability and knowledge, any guidance received in preparing of this thesis have been acknowledged” Signature Vo Xuan Duc Date: December 10th, 2016 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT A completed study would not be done without the assistance Therefore, the author who conducted this dissertation gratefully gives acknowledgement to all the support and motivation during the time of doing research as a requirement of completing my dissertation of Development Economics First of all, I would like to express my deepest gratitude and gratefulness to all reputable instructors in Vietnam Netherlands Program, who helped me to achieve the knowledge through interesting lessons, useful assignment, utility seminars and salutary information I would like to express my deep and sincere thanks to my advisor Dr Nguyen Huu Dung for the continuous support of my study and research, for his patience, motivation, enthusiasm, and immense knowledge I appreciate all his contributions of time, ideas, and funding to make my dissertation experience productive and stimulating I am grateful to all the staffs of Vietnam Netherlands Program’s office, have helped me to access books, references and necessary documents during the learning process My deeply thanks to all my friends during time I study in this great programme Their kindly help, care, motivation gave me strength and lift me up all the trouble for my study ABSTRACT This study investigates the impact of school resources on training outcome, based on the relationship between the annual number of graduates and related factors We examine that impact for understanding about the determinants could lead to the increase or decrease on the annual number of good graduates beyond school decisions about strategic adjustment of financial nvestments The data resource is constructed in association with the management board of the three universities supervised by MOIT; cited sources from MOET and goverment reports in duration 20042014 are used to analyze the impact of school resources on training outcome The quantitative results of Bootstrap replications method (1000 times) with random effect model indicated the importance of qualified teachers and the financial investment on infrastructure - upgrading the learning environment to the quality of training outcome Key Words: training outcome, school resources, higher education, graduates, accreditation, education production function TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1.1 Introduction 1.2 Scope of the study 1.3 Organization of the thesis CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW 2.1 Theoretical review 2.1.1 Higher education 2.1.2 The education production function 2.1.3 University resources 11 2.1.4 Number of graduates 16 2.2 Empirical review 17 CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY 3.1 Concept 23 3.2 Data resources 24 3.3 Production function 26 3.3.1 Fixed effects model (FEM) 30 3.3.2 Random effects model (REM) 31 3.3.3 Bootstrapping 31 3.4 Hausman test for choosing FEM or REM 35 CHAPTER 4: SCHOOL RESOURCES ON TRAINING OUTCOME 4.1 Overview about the higher education in Vietnam 37 4.2 Descriptive statistic 39 4.3 Regression results 45 CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION AND IMPLICATIONS 5.1 Main findings 48 5.2 Limitations of the study 49 5.3 Implications 50 5.4 Suggestions for further studies 52 APPENDIX 53 REFERENCES 57 CHAPTER INTRODUCTION 1.1 Introduction "Education and training have the mission to improve knowledge, develop human resources, cultivate country talent, contribute to national development, culture construction and the people of Vietnam" – Documents of the 11th Congress (The Communist Party of Vietnam, 2011) Along with the responsibility and task that the Party and the people entrusted, the education system Vietnam has gained remarkable achievements in the renewal and development of education in the country The number of educational institutions, as well as highly qualified human resources increased rapidly over the years Together with the increase in the number of eligible colleges upgraded to a university The diversity and competition in education has received much attention, such as the development of the international standard systems, international universities or international cooperation are constantly contributing to improve the educational background of the country, especially in the higher education “Higher Education is a prerequisite for the production of highly competent experts, which in turn, contributes to the development of organizations and the economy at large Higher Education therefore is expected to play an important and increasing role in the development of Human Capital of a nation” (Adedeji, 2013) In Vietnam, one of the most concerned subjects for years recently is the development of higher education A series of programs, schemes and development innovation education was implemented, but the quality of education is still a large question mark Following to the Proposal of Higher Education Reforming by the Ministry of Education and Training (MOET), up to 2020, Vietnam will build 900 universities and colleges with a total investment cost of 20 billion dollars and serve the total need of 4.5 million students And, according to The Education Development Strategy 2011-2020 (Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung, 2012), part section – Target of Development: “By 2020, the percentage of workers through job training and college at about 70%; the percentage of students in a thousand people around 350-400” These seemed that the target of higher education development in Vietnam directed towards the education universalization When the International Network for Quality Assurance Agencies in Higher Education (INQAAHE) was established in 1991; currently has more than 160 members (including specialized program inspectors) Vietnam is now also a member of this association And maybe, the problem of training quality could be solved or guaranteed through national systems of quality assessment, such as Centers of Education Accreditation of Vietnam National University HCMC (VNUHN), Da Nang University, Association of Universities and Colleges Vietnam… In which a university will be conducted to an accreditation process – the result is a dual decision (pass or fail) This is a comprehensive evaluation process, via the ten criteria stipulated by the MOET However, to be qualified as well as to have an adequate preparation, universities need to go through the process at least a few years and along with other financial issues In Vietnam, it seemed to be difficult to make sure that qualified universities have guarantee in training quality – perhaps it could be brought out the efficiency in the enrollment or the raising in the university reputation… According to the Decree 25/2006/QD-BGD&DT and 43/2007/QDBGD&DT - prescribed the Regulation of university and college training, student meets all the graduation standards will be conducted to be graduate (usually, it must go through the council of graduation – by the principal as chairman or vice-principal authorized by the rector) Graduate student will be awarded the diploma; this is certified for the process of learning, acquiring and accumulating knowledge Diploma, therefore, also shows the capacity of the grantees There are three common levels of grading: Excellence, Good and Average Graduate students with good final grade generally have better advantages in the recruitment Actually, there is almost unprecedented in the annual report on the output quality of each university - the number of graduate students ranked well To improve the quality of higher education, namely the quality of training is always a major matter in recent years Many researches on the higher-education development in the field of Master in Business Administration primarily concentrated in investigating student contentment with school services and training programs However, they based on survey data, which is apparently difficult to rely on, to access student’s satisfaction toward available resources; and one more important thing that their outcomes stem from the perspective of practitioners – “service beneficiaries” Challenges maybe come from inadequacies in education laws and policies, furthermore, universities themselves are now facing many difficulties once they still rely heavily on the state budget In other words, difficulty in developing and improving the training quality largely may come from the intrinsic capacity – school resources Consequently, how about the point of inner view – “service providers”? Why universities not to justify the effectiveness of training themselves with their own resources – constitutive factors and development activities Thus, we assumed the number of quality graduates as productive goods that university (as a firm) can train (or produce) over years Furthermore, the impacts of school resources on training quality may not be an array of new research From the 60s of the last century, there have been many studies such as Hanushek (1986, 1997, 2006), Woessmann (2003; 2005a; 2005b), Heyneman and Loxley (1982, 1983), Nascimento (2008); Harris and Goldrick-Rab (2011); Sullivan (2013)… discussed about this issue and it’s thematic The researchers from multiple aspects and different methods have brought many approaches and controversial results A fact that, the role of school resources allocation as well as the impact of these factors on student achievement differ for each of the range of research, countries or region, even each level of educational 10 difference in coefficients not systematic, thus, we choose REM to bootstrap with 1000 replications Table 4.5 Bootstrap replications (1000) with REM Variables R-squared HqT LFal Re ExA Lib 2.179476 46.00744 -117.8699 448.773 0.0053353 (3.85)* (5.88)* (1.40) (1.45) (1.06) 0.9789 Hence, with the help of bootstrapping technique to increase the sample large enough to rely on, from the table 4.5 we can conclude that there are significant positive impacts of HqT and LFal on QG Increasing in HqT with unit of measurement will make an impact of increasing units in QG, similarly to LFal funding with the raising of 46 in QG The learning Facilities has the strongest effect on the training outcome within this scope of this study In other words, increasing in learning facilities investments lead to the efficiency in training quality with the improvement of 46 good graduates for billion VND investment increasing; as well as the number of highly qualified teacher, one more teacher with higher qualified hired would helped to increase good graduates in total Moreover, table 4.5 shown that the other variables are statistically insignificant, which are Research, Extracurricular activities and Library The reason for these could be the investment scale for these aspects are not large enough to make impacts into the training quality, at least in this case study For example, IUH is the largest university of MOIT, the total number of student is more than 60.000 but investment for the extracurricular activities just fluctuated at around billion VND for 11 years Scientific research is one of primary concerns in the development 48 of universities, but the highest funding for this aspect was 3.8 billion and did not really reflect these universities’ potential Library, an integral component of any university, seemed to be not received adequate concern in development while these qualities of references and operation are very poor 49 CHAPTER CONCLUSION AND IMPLICATIONS 5.1 Main findings Research on the impact of school resources to the quality of training, or the results of student outcome is not a new subject on international dimensions However, applying a model from the previous study into particular is not feasible, because the fact that research results are not equal and different, even within a country or region, between developed countries and developing countries Furthermore, since the Coleman report (Coleman et al., 1966), economists constantly searching and concretize different research types of econometric model, as well as expand the scope of study, attempt to incorporate exogenous – endogenous explanatory variables to make the most well-grounded conclusions on this issue Most of studies on derived from the student outcome on basic academic subjects and their impact factors such as characteristics of learners - teachers and the learning environment where elements take place Even though, there are much controversy about specific properties of the model and the study results; within specific research scope it seemed to be hard to deny the existence of interactions between teaching elements and learning facilities support to the overall training outcomes (see 21st Century School Fund, 2010 and Policy Studies Associates, 2005) Despite other inputs have insufficient statistics significance, this study within scope of the research case has confirmed the importance of qualified teachers and the financial investment on infrastructure - upgrading the learning environment to the quality of student learning, specifically, statistically significance toward the quality of training outcome Although, the aspect of study is the standpoint of "manufacturing base" - here is from the perspective of the university management board, but compared to other domestic studies in terms of educational service beneficiary towards the school, by the factor analysis based on the survey, said to 50 be part of the coherence of results It is the interaction between students and teachers, the result of the qualified learning environment in which students take place Teachers play as role of conveyors of knowledge and inspiration to study research and learning facilities have an essential role in establishing qualified study environment and sufficient amenities for students 5.2 Limitations of the study In spite of delivering all the necessary effort to find out the consistent estimation results, this case study would not evade limitations objectively and subjectively relied on some hindrance that make influence to the initial purpose Firstly, the database is limited, our time dimension and other cost of collecting data make us only encapsulate within these three MOIT universities Furthermore, we could not afford to include more details on some concerned problems, like university reputation, efficiency of the management system or other institutional factors, budget on information technology applications, deeper investigating on research – professional social extracurricular activities – scale of electronic library… Secondly, one of our main goals of this case study is the premise to open a research avenues (sub-thematic in the near future) in considering the balance of educational investments within limited budget of universities, shortcomings in academic literature reviews is inevitable, as well as the feasibility of this study EPF within controversy on the sufficiency of other examined EPFs exist throughout decades Finally, it is our limitation of knowledge to deeply understand academic studies around the world and other regions to set more identically academic basements of each argues 5.3 Implications 51 Within twenty years, higher education has expanded at an unprecedented scale, from 893,754 students in 1999 increased to 2,177,299 in 2013, i.e 2.43 times in 14 years (source: MOET, 2014) The motivation of the socialization in higher education is the development of the global knowledge economy Governments all over the world are aware of the knowledge to create wealth, generate economic growth and changing social ladder However, noted that we are on steps to the postsocialization in higher education together with many challenges, those could be listed as the student ability to adapt with the increasing in level of recruitment demand, the quality of training to meet with the social demand on higher qualifications or the increasing gap between training field… Hence, based on the overall review, these might be some solutions: (1) Re-building development strategy with particular strategic objectives refers to modern models from countries with advanced education system For example, the German system of higher education develops toward the watchword of “creations and disseminations of knowledge” (2) Re-structuring training majors to be accordance with the requirements of the practical development situation of the country Currently, there are imbalances in the structure of qualification, career and regions The increased scale of training still takes place mostly at the university level; engineering and technology students at the college level and vocational schools is still low and slowly increased (3) Re-forming administrative management procedures and open-granting autonomy to universities; increasing the self-responsibility in order to improve competitiveness - as a motivation for development (4) Implementing and synchronizing strictly the qualification accreditation in universities; resolutely closing substandard educational institutions to maintain the overall quality in training 52 In addition, within the empirical result of this study, each of universities need to constantly improve quality of the staff and respond on a better utility for students, as follow: (1) Teaching staff: drafting the standard sets of instructors qualification in accordance with operational conditions and circumstances of each university; regulating priority recruitment policy and special treatment in order to attract experienced teachers force with high reputations; building equitable remuneration policies; enhancing the role of divisions in each faculty; encouraging and facilitating scientific research; creating intimacy and professional environment of cooperating, teaching and cultivating; separating administrative and academic management to avoid the discrimination (2) Learning facilities: allocating financial budget and funding toward students and teachers; improving the quality of laboratories and establishing research centers toward the interaction between teachers and students; funding for researches which the goal of enhancing learning-teaching amenities; strengthening aesthetics of the educational environment; amending quality of educational services and other services in order to reduce unnecessary costs of time; investing in other technology gadgets to evoke learning initiative 5.4 Suggestions for further studies As mentioned in the limitation and introduction sections, we cannot afford to determine more deeply into the aspect of the inner-view Hence, we are expecting that together with Preliminary results for the foundation to be able to expand the scope of this study and have the ability to control as much as the explanatory variables include the endogenous and exogenous problems to achieve the more feasible model of impacts estimation in the near future These could be reputation 53 of the universities, educational institutions factors and differences in each entity characteristics For further, each explanatory variables we examined within this study could be develop into a separated thematic to a research in more details with their affection toward training outcome by determining their own properties Other ways, we could rely on educational development strategies of universities located in different region in Vietnam make backward predications to convince university management in planning resources allocation APPENDIX 1.FEM regression result 54 REM regression result 55 Hausman test 56 57 Bootstraping REFERENCES 58 Adedeji, O S., & Campbell, O A (2013) The role of higher education in human capital development Available at SSRN 2380878 Bowles, S (1970) Towards an educational production function In Education, income, and human capital (pp 11-70) NBER Coleman, J S., Campbell, E., Hobson, C., McPartland, J., Mood, A., Weinfeld, F., & York, R (1966) The Coleman Report Equality of Educational Opportunity Efron, B (1979) Bootstrap Methods: Another Look At The Jackknife Ann Statist 7.1, 1-26 Everson, H T., & Millsap, R E (2005) Everyone Gains: Extracurricular Activities in High School and Higher SAT® Scores Research Report No 2005-2 College Board Fredricks, J A., & Eccles, J S (2006) Extracurricular Involvement and Adolescent Adjustment: Impact of Duration, Number of Activities, and Breadth of Participation Applied Developmental Science, 10(3), 132-146 Hanushek, E A (1986) The economics of schooling: Production and efficiency in public schools Journal of economic literature, 24(3), 1141-1177 Hanushek, E A (1997) Applying performance incentives to schools for disadvantaged populations Education and Urban Society, 29(3), 296-316 Hanushek, E A (2006) School resources Handbook of the Economics of Education, 2, 865-908 Hausman, J A (1978) Specification tests in econometrics Econometrica: Journal of the Econometric Society, 1251-1271 Hedges, L V., & Olkin, I (1980) Vote-counting methods in research synthesis Psychological Bulletin, 88(2), 359 59 Heyneman, S P., & Loxley, W A (1982) Influences on academic achievement across high and low income countries: A re-analysis of IEA data Sociology of Education, 13-21 Heyneman, S P., & Loxley, W A (1983) The distribution of primary school quality within high-and low-income countries Comparative education review, 27(1), 108-118 Hoai, T N (2006) Analytical methods Fulbright Economics Teaching Program, Lecture Gardner, M., Roth, Jodie L., Brooks-Gunn, J (2009) Can after-school programs help level the playing field for disadvantaged youth? 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