Vietnamese students in the US

Just a note: I will be off and on this week, as I celebrate Thanksgiving. Happy Turkey Day everyone!

Source: iie

Because this is a holiday week in the US, I thought it would be interesting to look a bit at a somewhat under-discussed subject: the surprisingly large number of Vietnamese studying in the US.

A friend just sent his daughter to boarding school in the US, but she is half-American, half-Vietnamese. The more surprising trend is the number of students overall from Vietnam studying in the US: almost 25,000. This means that Vietnam is ranked number 6 among all nationalities studying in the US.

OPT = Optional practical training. Source: iie

The other countries are the big ones: China, India. Then you have richer countries like South Korea and Saudi Arabia. The Saudi government sends lots of students abroad, and the reasoning always was that to get rid of young men right at the time that they were the most volatile. I also thought it was like the rumspringa, the rite of passage among Amish (traditional Christians in the US) where at the age of 16 they are allowed to break all of the rules: party, have sex, travel, etc. With the understanding that after a period, these teenagers will choose to return to the church or not. And they will have gotten a lot of this behavior out of them.

Source: iie

Anyway, back to the numbers: Vietnam is just behind Canada, despite being about one-eighteenth as rich. Most of the Vietnamese (17,000) are studying undergrad, with another 3,700 in graduate school. [All of this data is from IIE, an education non-profit that helps students study abroad. The Department of Homeland Security has a slightly different number (from March 2019) of 30, 684 students, including secondary school, language training, pilot training, etc.]

Interestingly, while most students from poorer countries focus on STEM, Vietnam has a large percentage that go into business and management (29%) and only 39% in STEM.

How big a deal is this?

For US universities, these students are cash cows. They don’t need to offer many scholarships, and there is no in-state tuition at the public universities (in the US, universities are funded by the states, so residents of these states pay lower tuition). The average cost of a year of undergrad for international students is $26,290, according to this source. That would equate to almost $450m in spending, and it doesn’t seem to include room and board (although I am not sure about this) or other expenses. That could add another 50%.

And of course, Vietnamese students study in many different places. There were more than 20,000 studying in Canada in 2018. This article says that Japan actually attracts the most students (39% of Vietnamese), while South Korea and Australia make up 22%, and the US and Canada 25%. The total spend is $3bn!

How does $3bn stack up to local spending?

A few stats:

• In 2016, 28..5% of Vietnamese students were enrolled in tertiary education, which is pretty high for ASEAN, only behind Thailand and Malaysia. (See my post from March 29.)

• The country spent 5.7% of GDP on education in 2013. Let’s assume it’s gone up a bit to 6%, and GDP was $245bn in 2018, which implies that the government is spending less than $15bn in education in total.

• The money spend going abroad equates to 20% of government spending. We can assume that private spending on education in Vietnam is sizeable, given how much people are willing to spend to send students abroad and the number of private schools in the country.

• The number of Vietnamese students studying abroad has grown tremendously. Canada and the US (where I have data) show crazy jumps. In the US, it has almost doubled in 10 years. In Canada, the number grew 48% in the school year 2017/18 alone.

Some conclusions to take away from this. First, private spending on education is very high in Vietnam. Second, a good portion of it is going abroad. Third, there is an increasing desire among Vietnamese parents to send their children abroad. As a corollary to this, there is a ability to pay this amount of money in a country where per capita GDP is just around $2,600.

There is a real effort to improve Vietnamese universities. The World Bank earmarked $155 million in 2017 to improve three universities. And there are private universities trying to make headwind, like Fulbright University.

I actually think it is good that Vietnamese students go abroad, because they get introduced to new ideas and systems. I studied and lived abroad for a number of years, and it changed who I am. Both sides should benefit. For example, the US students studying with Vietnamese in the US benefit from a different way to look at things. And the Vietnamese students get the same and can also bring back these learnings to Vietnam.

However, it would be a shame if Vietnam didn’t create public universities that would allow poorer students to study at the same high level as the richer students going abroad.

Bonus: this data sheet from WENR. Enjoy!