Educational Exchanges with Vietnam Growing Rapidly

Open Doors, a publication of the Institute of International Education, reports for the academic year 1998/99 the following enrollment of students from Vietnam in US higher education institutions:

Total 1,587, up 31% from the prior year’s 1,210. Almost 75% of these are undergraduates, with about 20% graduate students (308) and the rest in ESL or other non-degree programs. Total number of Vietnamese enrolled in Intensive English programs totalled 246. This figure includes many studying in private ESL program not necessarily based on US campuses. (About 100 of those 246 are already counted in the 1,587 figure for US campus-based Vietnamese).

There were 120 Vietnamese scholars on US campuses in 1998/99 doing teaching or research, up 40% from the prior year’s 86.

Students from the U.S. receiving credit for study in Vietnam in 1997/98 (the latest year for which data is available — i.e. they studied in 97/98 and received credit back home in 98/99) totalled 112, up 78% from the prior year’s 63.

The Overseas Vietnamese Contribution to National Development

Two billion dollars a year is sent back annually by the [two million] overseas Vietnamese to families left in their home country, according to the newly-formed private Overseas Vietnamese Business Association which held its first congress on March 25. The money pouring in has spawned thousands of small and hundreds of medium enterprises. “Forty percent of the Association members’ investment is funnelled into industry, 40 percent into services and 20 percent into entertainment,” says Duc Cominh, an overseas Vietnamese who holds a French passport and runs the Vietnam branch of AXA insurance. from a story published by AFP, April 6,2000

Al Gore on Vietnam with students at the Marie G. Davis Middle Schoo in Charlotte, NC

Most of his friends from high school and college found ways to avoid Vietnam, Gore said. “There were a lot of people my age who decided not to go and found different ways to get out of going most of them legal ways,’’ he said. “That was one of the things that was unfair about the draft. Some people could figure out how to get out of it and some people couldn’t.’’ Poor men, he said, ‘’were much more likely to be drafted and go to war.’’ Another reason Gore joined the Army, friends have said, was his concern that dodging the draft might hurt his senator-father’s re-election chances. As it turned out, his father lost anyway. In Vietnam, as an Army journalist, Gore said he spent his time looking for good stories. “I carried an M-16 and a pencil,’’ he said. The likely Democratic presidential nominee made it clear he would not have committed U.S. troops had he been president. “I thought the war was a big mistake,’’ he said. Associated Press, 4/13/2000

World Bank Loan to Hanoi for Electricity

The World Bank announced on September first that it had signed a loan deal worth 150 million dollars to help finance a project to extend electricity distribution in Vietnam’s countryside. The loan will finance most of the 201.3-million-dollar rural energy project which will extend the national electricity grid in 32 provinces and 671 communes, including 278 of the poorest communes in Vietnam. The loan agreement was signed on Friday morning between the World Bank resident representative Andrew Steer and the State Bank Governor Le Duc Thuy. “As a result, in the year 2000, 100 percent of the districts, 80 percent of the communes and 60 percent of the households in the rural areas will have access to electricity as a means of improving the social welfare and income and reducing poverty,” Le Duc Thuy said. Agence France Presse 9/1/00