FINANCIAL TECHNOLOGY AND OTHER RELATING ISSUES
5. Implications to autonomy in higher education in Vietnam
Operational autonomy has a positive impact on university autonomy from an overall perspective. Thus, the results of this study are similar to previous studies. This shows that, to be able to develop universities in a competitive way, universities need to be able to independently establish units within the university (such as faculties, institutes, centers) or other units, training support staff (usually departments, functional departments). In the current conditions, the problem of the apparatus is also a big problem when public universities are quite cumbersome, and functional units are quite numerous. Therefore, authors have some recommendations for schools as follows:
Firstly, it is necessary to narrow down the administrative apparatus in universities. It is recommended to establish a one-stop department but not to recruit more staff, but to transfer human resources from other departments to this department to serve the school's public administration. In addition, staff or training support specialists also need to be reduced because schools are building electronic portals, providing online services.
Secondly, it needs to have appropriate policies for teaching or research units within the university. Some faculties may merge to increase specialization, especially for universities of a specialized nature (e.g. economics or engineering only) and thus to be specialized in the field of study which the school has strengths or aims to.
Financial autonomy
Financial autonomy is the factor that has the strongest impact on university autonomy in general. This is consistent with the publishes of Roness et al (2008), Liu (2017), Pruvot and Estermann (2018). When the ability to operate on their own, universities can meet the requirements of input sources (mobilize capital for investment activities of the university), expand training programs and pay salaries to employees. This is also a general trend in the process of reforming Vietnam's higher education. The authors suggest that:
Firstly, universities need the right to decide on the specific tuition rates of each field, training programs according to learners' needs and training quality; decide the tuition rates for high-quality training programs, advanced and specific programs. They should publicize tuition fees for learners before enroling along with conditions to ensure training quality such as: facilities; teaching staff; output standards and services which are included in the tuition fees that learners are entitled to.
Secondly, it should expand the issue of creating resources for schools, including accessing financial resources from outside such as borrowing from banks. This can be done through the signing of strategic cooperation agreements between the parties: the university provides human resources; the banks provide capital. In addition, the expansion of resources from remote or semi-distance training (such as graduate teaching in the provinces) should also be considered.
Human resources autonomy
It seems that the recruitment process of lecturers, researchers and experts in Vietnamese university has not been appreciated. Rewarding, disciplining, appointing or promoting lecturers is also not a major concern of the leader or the respondents. This is a problem that needs to be resolved in the near future for universities - especially public universities - in Vietnam. The authors make some policy implications as follows:
First, there is a policy to attract lecturers who are able to research or publish well in international journals. Universities can call for and use an incentive mechanism so that foreign and domestic lecturers and researchers, even though they are not full-time staff of the university. When they post international articles, put their school's name as one of the university's names, where the author has worked on the system. Or schools can implement incentive mechanisms, form strong research groups and provide financial support for international publication registration, or use incentives for members of the university who have articles in reputable journals belonging to ISI/Scopus system. It is the financial incentives that have increased the number of research papers published in these journals.
Second, there is a policy to narrow the apparatus of specialists, officers, dismissing lecturers who do not have much research ability or have problems arising. This can be done through requesting international publication, or receiving feedback from students. But the implementation needs a large and long roadmap, especially for public universities.
Academic autonomy
Academic autonomy in this study mainly refers to the development of fields and programs, not to the issue of political dissent. The authors believe that in order to develop in the context of integration and especially from the requirements of recruitment in the labor market, higher education institutions efforts to build and develop training programs suitable to the human needs of the labor market. Schools should consider increasing the number of majors in line with market needs and the 4.0 era. At the same time, it needs to cooperate with foreign partners to deploy, build and implement high quality programs to meet the increasing needs of learners.
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