Many Ho Chi Minh City universities have protested a ministry ban on new enrollments at the university level, saying some of their majors should not have been subject to the ruling as they are all special areas.

Last month the Ministry of Education and Training (MoET) suspended 71 local higher education institutions from accepting new students into 207 undergraduate majors, starting from 2014, after they were found failing to meet MoET’s faculty standards.

MoET explained that these institutions could not satisfy its regulation that a university can only admit students to a certain major when they employ at least one permanent lecturer holding a PhD and three others with a master’s degree in the field they are going to teach.

The Hanoi Academy of Theater and Cinema, which had 15 majors suspended, has objected to this decision, arguing that the ministry failed to “fully understand” what it is teaching. 

Many seasoned lecturers with a bachelor’s degree have taught at the academy and helped transform many students into great artists, according to Tran Thanh Hiep, president of the academy.

“MoET did not fully understand our majors,” Hiep said. “Teaching the arts is very different from teaching other majors; a lecturer, even with a PhD, will struggle with students’ questions if he does not have enough hands-on experience.”

“What really matters in art is a work to be remembered for generations, not a degree,” Le Dang Thuc, a former academy president who is now a prestigious director, said Monday at a news conference the academy organized to voice its protests in Hanoi.

“MoET might want to tighten control on education quality with their ruling, but I am afraid the agency did it in the wrong way,” Thuc criticized.

Hiep, the current president, said that “universities in the world do not establish such a requirement for training art students,” in reply to a threat by the ministry that it will totally scrap the majors if the academy cannot ensure each of them is taught by at least one PhD and three holders of master’s degrees by 2015.

The Ho Chi Minh City University of Technical Education has expressed opposition to the suspension after the ministry banned it from recruiting new students for five majors, including fashion design and industrial engineering.

Industrial engineering is a very narrow specialization so it is hard for the school to meet the ministry’s requirement, Dr. Do Van Dung, president of the university, explained.

Dr. Dung claimed that the university does not have a PhD holder who teaches in the industrial engineering program because no school in the world offers doctoral courses in that area.

No PhD is teaching fashion design as it is also a special major, he added.

“Moreover we aim to train engineers to manage assembly lines, not researchers of garment making, so we see no necessity for any lecturer with a PhD,” he elaborated.

Similarly, an academic affairs chief at Saigon University decried the MoET prohibition imposed on its pedagogy of art and music areas, citing “special disciplines” as their reasoning.

But MoET has been determined in enforcing its ban in order to ensure quality in higher education.

“We have done everything in accordance with the law,” Bui Anh Tuan, a MoET official, said. “We will move on to entirely shut down the majors if the offenders are unable to rectify the situation by 2015.”

Tuan added that MoET already suspended 58 majors in 2010 and 161 others in 2013 following its inspections of universities and junior colleges nationwide.

The latest suspension followed a MoET inspection at 242 junior colleges and universities across the country.