Vietnam will have 13,000 graduates in finance-banking who cannot secure a job in the next four years, according to a report cited last month by the Ministry of Finance.

The report also showed that around 32,000 finance-banking majors will graduate in 2013, but only 20,000 of whom will be able to escape unemployment.

Given this scenario, the Ministry of Education and Training (MoET) has just announced it will ban higher learning schools from adding finance-banking, business administration, and accounting majors to their current training programs, starting next year.

Minister Pham Vu Luan said that his ministry will also suggest the Prime Minister impose a ban on the establishment of any new university specializing in these disciplines.

Graduates in economics-related majors, including finance-banking, business administration, and accounting, are now at a surplus, according to the ministry.

MoET statistics reveal that last year almost 60 percent of the country’s 416 universities and junior colleges offered one of the four following majors: economics, business administration, finance-banking, or accounting.

Quotas for these areas then accounted for more than one-third of the total registered enrollments, MoET said, adding that in absolute terms the percentage would double the workforce planned for these fields.

They made up as much as 50 percent of the planned numbers at many universities and junior colleges this year, according to figures collected by Tuoi Tre.

Even those universities specializing in such unrelated majors as agriculture, forestry, and technical disciplines also run economics-related courses and see them as their core teaching activities, Bui Van Ga, Deputy Minister of Education and Training, said.

Tran Huu Vien, president of the Hanoi-based Vietnam Forestry University, disclosed that enrollments in economics, accounting, and business administration often occupy half of the total enrollees at his school each year.

“We recruited around 300 students for undergraduate courses in accounting this year, while our total quota was 800,” Doan Van Thanh, the school vice president, pointed out.