Quality Assurance and Institutional Autonomy in Vietnamese Higher Education
摘要
This chapter discusses the two concepts of heightened attention in Vietnamese higher education recently, namely “university autonomy” and “quality assurance”. The chapter first introduces a brief definition of the two concepts and reviews the debate on whether quality assurance facilitates or conflicts with university autonomy. It then revisits a recent law in Vietnam that mandates quality assurance as a condition for university autonomy and presents some varying views of the mandate. The chapter acknowledges the challenges that Vietnamese universities face in exercising quality assurance and university autonomy when their capacity is limited. To conclude, the chapter calls attention to capacity building for Vietnamese universities to achieve their missions, which requires strong government support at this stage.