that of Germany.

eap upward, that is, creating an educated workforce that can research and design its own products. Vietnam’s successful neighbors, such as Singapore and South Korea, invested heavily in universities and science to pull themselves out of the trap. Today, Samsung and LG are world leaders in the mobile phone and television industries.

It also appears Vietnam is following a Chinese model of economic growth that emphasizes education, said Wolf Rieck, the president of the Vietnamese-German University. “There seems to be a connection between Vietnam’s strategy to develop the economy from a low level of productivity and industrialization,” he said, “to a science-based economy.” The problem here, analysts say, is that while Vietnam has a high literacy rate of 90 percent, Vietnamese universities have for decades pushed aside hard skills in favor of rote memorization and communist theory. Companies complain graduates often need re-training. “There’s a lack of competent engineers who are capable of fixing problems,” Vo said.

Intel learned that lesson two years ago. When the company was building a $1 billion chip factory outside Ho Chi Minh City, it gave a basic screening exam on technology topics to 2,000 graduating students. Only 90 test-takers scored at least 60 percent, and half failed an English competency test.

Vietnam is reaching out to overseas Vietnamese, seeking to persuade academics to return to their former homeland and train students in hard skills. Vo's university, IU, operated under a state-run umbrella group of schools called the Vietnam National University (VNU), tries to alleviate “brain drain” by offering wages 10 times higher than many other local universities.

Some IU students get the chance to study for two years at universities in the United States, the United Kingdom or Australia, the sort of training that develops their English-language and hard-science skills. IU, which was founded in 2003, says it's looking to Western education models for inspiration. After several trips abroad to start the university, “we learned from the U.S. and other English-speaking countries” on how to run a university, said IU’s rector, Ho Thanh Phong.

Education here is becoming a big business. Between 2001 and 2006, the number of students enrolled in universities or colleges here rose from about 900,000 to 1.6 million, according to the World Bank. And by 2020, Vietnam hopes at least one of its schools will join the ranks of the world's top 200 universities. To do that, the strategies are numerous. For instance, Vietnam is appealing directly to foreign governments to help set up schools. One university based on the German curriculum, the VGU in Ho Chi Minh City, opened its doors two years ago to 32 students. It’s set to finish building its campus by 2016, hoping to enroll 12,000 students. In what was once a staunchly communist country closed off to foreigners, that sort of collaboration is something of a breakaway. The university is the first of its kind to get a charter, for example, that promises a level of academic freedom resembling that of Germany.
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