How Vietnam Remade Imported Ideas of Private Higher Education

Private higher education now enrolls roughly one out of every three university students in the world, yet the story of how the very idea of non-state universities traveled across borders has remained surprisingly obscure. A new study of Vietnam, published in the journal Higher Education, offers one of the most detailed reconstructions to date of that journey, tracing how foreign concepts of private and nonprofit higher education entered a one-party socialist state, mutated along the way, and ultimately produced institutions that look unlike anything their original promoters imagined. The research, conducted by Quang Chau of Vietnam National University Hanoi and Ni Thi Ha Nguyen of Vietnam National University Ho Chi Minh City, draws on archival documents, autobiographical narratives, and 47 interviews with elite policymakers, offering a rare longitudinal view of policy transfer in action.

The study tackles a persistent puzzle in comparative education. Scholars have long attributed the global surge of private higher education either to supra-national pressures, such as the influence of international organizations and global markets, or to domestic dynamics, such as rising demand and shrinking state budgets. Neither explanation, the authors argue, actually traces the process by which ideas about private provision move: who carries them, through which networks, in what form, and how they change in transit. To fill that gap, the researchers combined two analytical tools. The first is the Glonacal agency heuristic, originally developed by Simon Marginson and Gary Rhoades and updated by Marginson in 2022, which directs attention to the global, national, and local scales at which actors exercise agency. The second is the policy mobility concept from economic geography, associated with Jamie Peck and Nik Theodore, which treats policies not as fixed models that get copied but as mobile assemblages that mutate as they travel.

Vietnam makes an ideal laboratory for this question. After the economic reforms known as Doi Moi launched in 1986, the country, still governed by a single ruling party, gradually reopened space for non-state actors in a sector that had been almost entirely public. Two distinct policy trajectories emerged over the following decades. The first was the emergence of generic private higher education, meaning non-state provision of any kind. The second was the later evolution of a specific nonprofit form of private higher education, an idea imported more deliberately and codified in law. By following both trajectories across spaces and through time, the researchers could compare what happens when ideas arrive as vague imaginaries versus when they arrive attached to concrete legal models.

The empirical work was unusually demanding. The team assembled archival policy documents spanning decades, collected autobiographical narratives from figures who lived through the founding era of Vietnamese private universities, and conducted 47 elite interviews with the policymakers, institutional founders, and advisers who shaped the sector. Elite interviewing of this kind, a method discussed extensively in the policy literature, requires access to once-powerful actors whose decisions are otherwise poorly documented, and retrospective accounts must be triangulated against the documentary record. The resulting dataset allowed the researchers to reconstruct not just what policies said, but who proposed them, which foreign references they invoked, and how those references were understood or misunderstood by different factions within the Vietnamese state.

The first major finding concerns the nature of what travels. In both the generic and nonprofit cases, transnational policy actors, including international organizations, foreign-educated technocrats, and transnational academic networks, played decisive roles in bringing private higher education ideas into Vietnam. But those ideas did not arrive as coherent, ready-made models. Instead, they arrived as what the authors call partial and unsystematic imaginaries: fragmented visions of what private higher education might be, drawn from heterogeneous foreign examples and filtered through the imaginations of the carriers. A legal text or a study tour might convey a silhouette of the American private university or the Japaneseorporatized institution, but the underlying institutional logic, financing structures, and governance arrangements rarely traveled with it.

In the generic private higher education case, those fragmentary imaginaries were then further mutated by domestic factional politics. Rather than producing a single national model, the collision of partial foreign visions with internal competition among policy factions generated what became known in Vietnam as the people-founded university, a distinctive institutional form unlike the private universities of liberal market economies. Institutions established under this banner developed divergent practices across the country, with some behaving like family businesses, others like quasi-public extensions, and others like commercial enterprises. The study shows that this institutional heterogeneity was not an accident of weak regulation but a direct product of how mobile ideas, only partially understood, were renegotiated inside a factionalized state apparatus.

The nonprofit trajectory tells an even more instructive story. Here, the actors promoting the policy included people with first-hand experience of the same reference model, individuals who had studied or worked within actual nonprofit institutions abroad. One might expect that shared experiential grounding would produce a unified vision. Instead, the researchers found that even these actors promoted divergent versions of what nonprofit private higher education should mean in the Vietnamese context, differing on questions of governance, asset ownership, and the distribution of surpluses. And crucially, when the nonprofit idea was finally codified into Vietnamese law, a genuine legislative success, the legal text failed to generate the corresponding social practices. Institutions did not reorganize themselves around the nonprofit form in the ways the statute envisioned, revealing a stubborn gap between codification and everyday institutional behavior.

These findings lead the authors to two conceptual contributions. First, in the updated Glonacal framework, Simon Marginson distinguished three spatial dimensions of agency: imagined space, where actors conceive of possibilities beyond their immediate context; material space, where resources and institutions are physically organized; and social practice space, where everyday routines and behaviors actually unfold. The Vietnamese evidence shows that these three spaces interact sequentially rather than simultaneously. Imagined spaces, populated by foreign imaginaries, opened first; material spaces, such as new legal categories and institutional buildings, followed; and social practice spaces lagged far behind, sometimes indefinitely. Policy mobility, in other words, is not a single moment of transfer but a staggered process in which each spatial dimension operates on its own timescale.

Second, the study characterizes Vietnam’s one-party state as an asymmetric gatekeeper in the global circulation of education policy. The state can effectively control which transnational ideas get codified into law, filtering, editing, and domesticating foreign models before they enter the statute books. But codification is where its gatekeeping power ends. The same state apparatus cannot conjure the societal practices that its own legislation envisions, because practices emerge from the incentives, histories, and strategies of thousands of institutional actors, not from legal text alone. This asymmetry, between the power to legislate and the inability to command social practice, complicates common images of authoritarian states as all-powerful policy adopters and suggests that even tightly controlled political systems are porous to, and transformed by, transnational ideas they cannot fully steer.

For a world in which private higher education continues to expand, particularly across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, the Vietnamese case carries a sobering lesson. Exporting a legal model, however carefully drafted and however experienced its promoters, does not transplant the institution itself. What crosses borders most readily are imaginative fragments, and what those fragments become depends on the factional politics, gatekeeping structures, and sequencing of spaces in the receiving country. The research, funded by the Vietnam National Foundation for Science and Technology Development, demonstrates the analytical payoff of pairing the Glonacal heuristic with processual policy mobility tools, and it reframes the worldwide rise of private higher education not as the diffusion of a model but as the ongoing, uneven mutation of an idea, one national story at a time.

Subject of Research: Transnational policy mobility and the evolution of private higher education in Vietnam

Article Title: Transnational mobilities of private higher education policy across spaces, time and through actors: a case study of Vietnam

Article References: Transnational mobilities of private higher education policy across spaces, time and through actors: a case study of Vietnam. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-026-01775-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10734-026-01775-2

Keywords: private higher education, policy mobility, Vietnam, Glonacal agency heuristic, nonprofit universities, policy transfer, one-party state, elite interviews, higher education policy, institutional mutation, transnational actors, Transnational