ORCID
0000-0002-2334-3175
Date of Award
Summer 2026
Language
English
Embargo Period
8-10-2028
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
College/School/Department
Department of Educational Policy and Leadership
Program
Educational Policy and Leadership
First Advisor
Daniel C. Levy
Committee Members
Daniel C. Levy, Gilbert A. Valverde, Elizabeth St. George
Keywords
private higher education, for-profit, higher education policy, Vietnam, people-founded
Subject Categories
Education Policy | Higher Education Administration | International and Comparative Education | Political Economy | Public Administration | Public Policy
Abstract
In 2005–2006, Vietnam—a communist party-state—legalized for-profit private higher education (PHE) and, more remarkably, mandated the for-profit form as the sole legal option for its private sector, an outcome without documented precedent worldwide. This dissertation explains how this twofold anomaly came about, addressing two questions: whether people-founded (dân lập) universities—the institutional form that constituted Vietnam’s PHE sector from 1993 to 2006—were de facto for-profit; and how the for-profit form was first legalized and then imposed upon the entire sector.
Guided by two bodies of scholarship—the global PHE literature, including Levy's (2006) delayed regulation thesis, and Vietnam’s political economy, particularly state-society dynamics and intra-party factionalism—the study employs a qualitative-historical design covering all nineteen people-founded universities. It combines archival reconstruction of policy dossiers, elite interviews with more than fifty policymakers, bureaucrats, university founders, investors, and leaders, and institutional documents, analyzed through Framework Analysis to enable systematic triangulation across source types, actors, and periods.
On the first question, among institutions with reliable data, all but one—the sector’s only purely donation-based university—distributed revenues, through full surplus distribution, fixed-rate dividends, or variable arrangements. Funding source strongly predicted distribution: private investment was associated with distribution and over-enrollment practices, whereas donation-based institutions resisted profit-maximizing pressures. People-founded universities were thus de facto for-profit by the defining criterion of legal for-profit standing, while remaining hybrid in other dimensions.
On the second question, the study reconstructs the policy trajectory through two complementary periodizations: one policy-focused, moving from Delayed Regulation through Strong Intervention and Pluralism to Monopoly; the other factionalism-focused, tracing shifting power between market-friendly and anti-market orientations. Legalization and monopoly, though nearly simultaneous, rested on distinct foundations. The legalization exemplified delayed regulation: the state’s acknowledgement of entrenched revenue-distribution realities once the anti-market constraint had lapsed. The monopoly required a conjuncture of three elements: a legal foundation in the 2005 redefinition of the people-founded form, whose exclusionary implication its drafters did not anticipate; initiating triggers—one university’s conversion request and an association's tactical interpretation of the redefinition as mandating sector-wide conversion; and a factional opening exploited through a non-state channel.
Vietnam’s for-profit monopoly thus emerged from no state master plan but from state-society interaction. To the PHE literature, the dissertation contributes a documented account of how the for-profit PHE form evolves and extends the delayed regulation thesis beyond regulation’s onset into post-onset trajectories, including reversal attempts whose failures shaped the eventual settlement. To scholarship on Vietnam’s political economy, the dissertation shows that state-society configurations alternated within a single policy domain—each finding its season—and that factional influence penetrated the education bureaucracy in a personalized, and therefore fragile, form: carried by specific individuals rather than embedded in institutional structures.
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Chau, Quang, "The Legalization and Monopoly Mandate of For-Profit Private Higher Education in Vietnam" (2026). Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present). 542.
https://scholarsarchive.library.albany.edu/etd/542
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