Program Officer
Vietnam Education Foundation
Joe MacAde coordinated refugee education in Southeast Asia. Other consulting work has taken him to China, Korea, Egypt, Qatar, Brazil, Australia, and several European nations. Jim Castagnera caught up with him in Washington, D.C. in June 2008, two days before MacAde departed on a three-week visit to Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City and Danang.
What is the Vietnam Education Foundation?
Our foundation sponsors Vietnamese doctoral students in the sciences. We push for placement in major universities such as Harvard, Princeton and Yale. The new batch arriving for the fall, about 40 to 50, will bring the current scholar total to about 270. Most are here for five-plus years under J-Visas. The Vietnamese government foots the bill. The foundation is actually an agency of the U.S. government. Our board includes the Secretaries of State, Treasury and Education, as well as several presidential appointees.
What does your Program Officer job entail?
I handle the logistics involved in the fellowship program that I just described to you. I also run a Visiting Scholars program. Academics come over here for short-term research and learning activities--usually eight to ten scholars placed with research universities for six months to a year each. We've also recently begun to have Americans conducting distance-learning courses for Vietnamese universities. On Saturday I leave for Vietnam to conduct three weeks of pre-departure orientation on American lfie and academic culture, the rules of the fellowship and team building for the next 50 fellows.
What is the landscape of the higher education industry in Vietnam?
Is the typical profile of a third-world education system. Curriculum delivery is lecture-based. Institutions lack facilities and other resources. Faculty are underpaid and overworked. No connection exists between research and the rest of the education enterprise. The system is centralized. All decisions must be cleared by the education ministry. However, there is cause for optimism in a growing awareness of these problems. I detect an enthusiasm on the instutional level for changing things.
What opportunities, if any, are available to U.S.higher education providers in Vietnam?
There's a real interest in linkages at the institutional level, limited most likely to science and engineering. Though Vietnamese higher education is resource-starved in every respect, the economy is growing at the rate of eight percent annually, about the same rate as Ireland. And I find that more and more Vietnamese students are interested in studying abroad.
Do you find interest among Vietnamese academics and doctoral students in working and studying in the United States?
Most definitely. Our foundation can fund only a small percentage, and Vietnam has a much larger number who are technically qualified. The Ministry of Education and Training is creating a fund of its own to start up parallel programs to ours. Its ultimate goal is to turn out 20,000 Ph.D.s over an unspecified period of time. Were lending them technical assistance.