The Vietnam Education Foundation and the Digital Utility

Benefiting from global economic integration is not easy. It means more than tradingor even getting FDI. It means creating conditions so that local knowledge is attractive tohigher value added activities that draw in high quality capital, technology and management.This inflow sparks further activity, faster growth, and acts as an inducement for youngpeople to acquire ever-greater skills. How does one get started on this virtuous circle?
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The Vietnam Education Foundation and the Digital UtilityFulbright Economics Teaching Program Technology & Development Vietnam Education Foundation and the Digital Utility The Vietnam Education Foundation and the Digital Utility David Dapice Benefiting from global economic integration is not easy. It means more than tradingor even getting FDI. It means creating conditions so that local knowledge is attractive tohigher value added activities that draw in high quality capital, technology and management.This inflow sparks further activity, faster growth, and acts as an inducement for youngpeople to acquire ever-greater skills. How does one get started on this virtuous circle? One sure way is to train large numbers of people in science and technology. InVietnam, the Soviet Union provided quite good scientific training at the graduate level, butthat meant that higher-level education within Vietnam did not develop so much. Also, theSoviet model of separating research in institutes from education in universities has provensomewhat less productive than mixing them. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, therewas a distinct decline in the level of scientific training for Vietnamese scientists andengineers. At the same time, budget cutbacks meant many institutes had to become self-supporting. This often meant doing applied services, or even leaving science altogether. Anumber of surveys in the 1990’s concluded that science education and research in Vietnamwas slipping and badly needed to renovate itself.1 Many initiatives are underway but one of special interest is the Vietnam EducationFoundation. This is a US foundation established by the US Congress and announced byPresident Clinton on his visit to Vietnam.2 President Bush has appointed its Board ofDirectors and it is just starting its activities. It is charged with promoting science andtechnology (S&T) in Vietnam, primarily through providing scholarships for Vietnamesewho have been accepted to graduate S&T programs in the US, but also by running specialone-year programs in both Hanoi and HCMC to prepare young Vietnamese scientists forgraduate studies in the US. These programs would make use of US scientists who wouldteach and advise on curriculum development. Initial funding for 15 years is about $5million a year.3 It may be augmented if there are more qualified applicants, with funds fromboth public and private sources likely. Part of the hope of the VEF is the hope that the curricular investments made in thepreparatory programs will also help improve the teaching of science throughout Vietnam inall of the universities. To accomplish this, there are a number of other related initiativesalso aiming to upgrade overall S&T. One, the Millennium Science Initiative, helps selectdeveloping nations to create new science research groups that are well tied into globalknowledge networks and run by scientists in a lean and productive manner. Rather than1 See, for example, “Science, Technology and Industry Strategy for Vietnam,” UNDP, 2001.2 The source of these funds is payment of debt owed to the US by Vietnam. It came from the 1995 normalization of relations. Vietnam got the foreign exchange assets of the old regime in exchange for agreeing to make the (smaller value of) payments on the old regime’s civilian debt. Many Americans argued that this exchange, while normal legal practice, lacked historical sensitivity.3 This amount can support a surprising number of graduate students since after the first year, many S&T graduate programs support their students from university resources, freeing the VEF to support more first year Vietnamese. Perhaps 100 per year could be supported from current levels of funding.David Dapice 1Fulbright Economics Teaching Program Technology & Development Vietnam Education Foundation and the Digital Utilityhave a large permanent staff, there is a small core group and a large number of young,bright scientists rotated through. The hope is they will find ways to apply for interestingresearch funding and return to their home institutions and improve the level of teaching andresearch. Vietnam is currently in line to be a MSI member. However, another initiative has even wider implications. This is called the “DigitalUtility.” The fact is that good research requires good libraries and access to huge amountsof information that is complete and up to date. Very few developing nations have investedenough to provide this for their scientists, much less students. In response, a number offoundations and other groups have suggested an alternative. Why not develop an electroniclibrary that provides this access? Furthermore, why not include in this library not just booksand journals, but also entire classes? The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has begunlisting all of its classes – lecture notes, readings, problem sets, and tests. Anyone wanting itcan get it through the Internet, for free. If, in addition, lectures of excellent teachers orresearchers were also on-line (they are now available on videotape in entire courses forhundreds of dollars), then many poorly budgeted universities could upgrade both theirteaching and that part of research that required information more than expensiveinstrumentation. This pattern need not be restricted to science either. If the copyright andtechnical issues can be overcome, there would be a huge jump in the availability ofknowledge to anyone with an Internet connection. The name “Digital Utility” comes from the n ...