The research team, led by Thao Van Vi of the East Asia University of Technology in Hanoi together with colleagues from Hanoi National University of Education, the University of Danang, and Vinh University, set out to test a proposition that sounds almost paradoxical: that a nineteenth-century philosophical framework could serve as a training ground for twenty-first-century workplace competencies. Their survey-based study measured how students perceived the philosophy course and whether those perceptions correlated with self-reported soft skill development, using regression analysis to isolate which factors mattered most.

The headline finding is striking in its simplicity. Students’ positive perceptions of the philosophy course had the strongest statistical impact on their soft skills development of any factor examined. In other words, when students engaged with the material rather than merely enduring it, the course appeared to function as a genuine skills incubator. The authors argue that this effect is not automatic but conditional: the benefits emerge primarily when the philosophy is taught through interactive methods and connected to practical, real-world problems rather than delivered as rote memorization of doctrine.

Why would dialectical materialism and historical materialism build communication and teamwork skills? The mechanism, according to the study’s theoretical framework, lies in the structure of philosophical reasoning itself. Marxist-Leninist philosophy trains students to analyze contradictions, examine phenomena in their interconnections, and trace how opposing forces interact to produce change. These are, in essence, the cognitive operations underlying problem-solving: identifying tensions in a situation, weighing competing explanations, and synthesizing a coherent resolution. When classroom discussion requires students to defend an analysis of social phenomena, they practice argumentation, listening, and collaborative reasoning simultaneously.

The study situates itself within a substantial body of evidence on the economic value of soft skills. Economists including James Heckman have demonstrated that character and interpersonal skills predict labor market outcomes at least as strongly as cognitive test scores, and surveys of executives routinely place communication, teamwork, and adaptability at the top of hiring priorities. In Vietnam, where the economy is deeply integrated into global supply chains and graduates compete in an increasingly internationalized labor market, the stakes of soft skills development are particularly high. Universities have responded with dedicated employability programs, but the new research suggests that existing mandatory coursework may be an underused resource.

Methodologically, the researchers administered a structured questionnaire to 527 students drawn from six Vietnamese universities, using Likert-scale items to gauge both perceptions of the philosophy course and self-assessed competencies across the four target skill domains. The team validated their instruments through standard psychometric procedures, including factor analysis to confirm that the measured constructs were statistically distinct, and applied multiple regression to determine the relative contribution of course perceptions to skills outcomes while controlling for other variables. The authors report that the data supporting the study’s conclusions are fully provided in the article, with additional data available on reasonable request.

The findings align with a growing Vietnamese literature on critical thinking in higher education. Prior studies at the University of Danang and Ho Chi Minh City Open University have explored how philosophy teaching can cultivate creative and critical reasoning, while other Vietnamese research has documented persistent gaps between students’ critical thinking capacities and the demands of argumentative writing and professional practice. The new study extends this work by quantifying the relationship between a specific mandatory course and a broad portfolio of soft skills, rather than focusing on critical thinking alone.

The pedagogical implications are where the research becomes most actionable. The authors contend that the traditional lecture-heavy format common in philosophy courses across Vietnam risks squandering the subject’s potential. Interactive approaches, including structured debate, case-based discussion, and group projects that apply dialectical analysis to contemporary social and economic questions, appear to be the pathway through which the course translates theory into transferable skills. This mirrors international findings in the scholarship of teaching and learning, which consistently show that active learning formats outperform passive transmission for developing higher-order reasoning and interpersonal competencies.

There are, of course, limits to what a cross-sectional survey can establish. The study measures perceptions and self-reports rather than independently assessed skill performance, and correlation through regression analysis cannot fully rule out the possibility that students who already possess stronger soft skills simply view their philosophy courses more favorably. Longitudinal designs tracking students from enrollment through graduation, and employer evaluations of graduate performance, would be needed to confirm the causal pathway the authors propose. The research ethics were validated by the Department of Scientific Research at the East Asia University of Technology, with anonymous participation and voluntary withdrawal guaranteed for all respondents.

Even with those caveats, the study carries a provocative message for educators well beyond Vietnam. It suggests that the content of a curriculum matters less than how it is taught, and that even courses perceived as ideological or antiquated can become engines of transferable competence when instructors connect abstract frameworks to lived experience. As universities worldwide scramble to embed employability skills across their programs, the Vietnamese case offers a reminder that the most unlikely courses may already be teaching exactly what the modern workplace demands, provided students are invited to think rather than merely memorize.

Subject of Research: The role of Marxist-Leninist philosophy education in developing soft skills among Vietnamese university students

Article Title: Marxist-Leninist philosophy – the foundation for developing soft skills: a case study of Vietnamese students

Article References: Tuyet, M. T., Hai, H. T., Thi, M. A. N. T. K., & Van Vi, T. (2026). Marxist-Leninist philosophy – the foundation for developing soft skills: a case study of Vietnamese students. SN Social Sciences, 6(10), Article 512. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01795-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01795-w

Keywords: Marxist-Leninist philosophy, soft skills, critical thinking, communication skills, teamwork, problem-solving, Vietnamese higher education, regression analysis, employability, philosophy of education, interactive teaching, survey research

The research, led by Paula Crespí of the Universidad Francisco de Vitoria in Madrid together with colleagues at that institution and the Universidad Anáhuac Querétaro in Mexico, is notable precisely because such programs are so rare. A survey of 86 Spanish universities revealed that only 30 offer specific courses in soft skills or generic competencies, and most of those are optional, awarded-degree add-ons or postgraduate offerings rather than compulsory elements of a bachelor’s degree. In Mexico, an analysis of the ten largest universities in one major city found that only six offered such subjects at all. Against that backdrop, the two institutions studied here stand out: at both, every undergraduate, regardless of faculty, must complete courses designed specifically to cultivate intrapersonal and interpersonal competencies.

The Spanish case centered on a first-year mandatory course called Personal Skills and Competencies, taught across all 21 degree programs at the Universidad Francisco de Vitoria, a Madrid institution founded in 1993 with roughly 20,000 students. The course pushes students to think about personal fulfillment in its personal, social, academic and professional dimensions, combining classroom work with six one-hour, face-to-face mentoring sessions. Its methodology is experiential, drawing on project-based learning and the creation of a personal development plan. The Mexican case was more elaborate. At the Universidad Anáhuac Querétaro, founded in 2006 and part of an eight-institution network, first-year students take University Formation A, which guides them through an exploration of their identity, values and motivations, alongside Leadership and Personal Development. Second-year students then take University Formation B, which emphasizes emotional intelligence and community engagement, plus Leadership and High-performing Teams, which targets collaboration skills directly. Both Mexican courses embed five half-hour individual mentoring sessions into the semester.

What unites all five courses is a commitment to experiential learning in the tradition described by David Kolb, in which students learn by doing, reflecting and iterating, supported by continuous assessment rather than a single high-stakes exam. This methodological choice matters. The literature on soft skills development identifies a wide menu of possible approaches, from hackathons and role-playing to game-based learning, coaching and student-led initiatives such as clubs and associations. But the authors argue that compulsory, purpose-designed curricular subjects remain the least common and least studied option, despite being the approach most likely to reach every student rather than a self-selected minority.

To measure whether these courses actually work, the team ran three quasi-experimental studies during the 2022–23 academic year: one at the Spanish university tracking the first-year course, and two at the Mexican university, one for each year of the program. In total, 1,353 students participated, 675 in Spain and 678 in Mexico. Each study used a pretest/post-test design without a control group, administering a validated instrument called the Basic Generic Competencies Questionnaire immediately before and after each course. The questionnaire contains 36 items organized into two broad dimensions. The intrapersonal dimension covers introspection, including self-awareness, self-acceptance and self-management, and personal development, including the search for meaning in life, orientation to excellence and proactivity. The interpersonal dimension covers teamwork, spanning cooperative work, work environment management and orientation toward results, and effective communication, spanning verbal, paraverbal and non-verbal communication. Each item is rated on a six-point scale, a choice made deliberately to avoid central tendency bias. The instrument showed excellent internal consistency of 0.94 overall.

The statistical analysis relied on Student’s t-test for related samples to compare initial and final scores, an approach justified by the large sample size despite non-normal score distributions. Differences by gender were tested with t-tests for independent samples, and differences between faculties with one-way analysis of variance, with effect sizes quantified using Cohen’s d and the eta-squared index. In the Spanish study, students reported significant improvements in both dimensions, but the effect was clearly larger for intrapersonal competencies. Every subdimension improved significantly except teamwork, which showed no change, and within it the specific competence of cooperative work even declined slightly. The standout result was self-awareness, with a medium effect size of 0.580, alongside a notable gain in the broader introspection subdimension.

The Mexican results told a broadly consistent story. In the first-year study, both dimensions improved significantly with similar effect sizes, and the strongest gains appeared in verbal and non-verbal communication, self-awareness and orientation to excellence. Cooperative work and work environment management again failed to improve significantly, which the authors consider unsurprising given that these competencies were not the explicit focus of the first-year courses. In the second-year study, only the intrapersonal dimension improved significantly, driven by the personal development subdimension, while the teamwork hypothesis was not confirmed. Across all three studies, gender made no significant difference to outcomes, and faculty effects were either small or absent, suggesting the programs work reasonably uniformly across disciplines, from engineering to health sciences.

The stubborn weakness of teamwork is one of the study’s most intriguing findings, and the authors offer a psychologically plausible explanation. First-year students, they suggest, tend to equate group work with teamwork, assuming that dividing up tasks is all there is to collaboration. This inflates their initial self-perception, leaving little apparent room for improvement. As the courses unpack what genuine teamwork actually requires, coordinating, managing conflict, orienting collectively toward results, students’ self-assessments become more realistic and can even dip. In other words, the apparent decline in cooperative work may reflect a correction of overconfidence rather than a deterioration of skill, a distinction the authors say can only be resolved by contrasting self-perception with actual performance on collaborative tasks.

Why did intrapersonal competencies benefit more consistently than interpersonal ones? The authors point to the individual mentoring sessions woven through every course. One-on-one mentoring, they argue, is inherently suited to developing self-knowledge, self-management and personal direction, complementing the experiential classroom work. This aligns with earlier findings by the same team on the impact of mentoring on transversal competence development, and with broader meta-analytic evidence on the effectiveness of structured character and competence education programs. The practical implication is concrete: universities designing soft skills courses should treat mentoring not as an optional enrichment but as a core component of the pedagogical model.

The study’s conclusions come with candid caveats. The quasi-experimental design lacked a control group, so factors such as prior experience, motivation or general maturation over an academic year cannot be ruled out as alternative explanations. The measurement relied entirely on self-report, which is an indirect indicator of actual competence, associated with self-efficacy rather than demonstrated performance. Sample attrition between measurements also forced the abandonment of one faculty-level hypothesis. The authors recommend that future work adopt mixed methods, longitudinal designs tracking whether gains persist across a degree program, control groups for stronger causal inference, and performance-based assessments that observe behavior directly. Still, as a first empirical test of a rarely studied curricular model, the message is striking: compulsory courses built specifically for soft skills, taught through experiential methods and reinforced by individual mentoring, can move the needle on the competencies that employers increasingly prize and that traditional curricula so often neglect. For universities still treating soft skills as an afterthought, the evidence now suggests there is a tested blueprint waiting to be adopted.

Subject of Research: Effectiveness of compulsory soft skills curricular courses on university students' transversal competencies in Spain and Mexico

Article Title: Effectiveness of soft skills curricular subjects: a case study of two universities, Spain and Mexico

Article References: Crespí, P., López González, J., Rodríguez-Barroso, J., & Virués, R. (2025). Effectiveness of soft skills curricular subjects: a case study of two universities, Spain and Mexico. Journal of New Approaches in Educational Research, 14(1), Article 15. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44322-025-00035-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44322-025-00035-y

Keywords: soft skills, higher education, transversal competencies, intrapersonal competencies, interpersonal competencies, mentoring, experiential learning, curriculum design, quasi-experimental study, Spain, Mexico, employability

The study, conducted by Mei Lai of Soochow University and Jisun Jung of the University of Hong Kong, deliberately pivots away from conventional outcome measures. Instead of asking what graduates achieved, the researchers asked how students engaged intentionally with their circumstances, how they navigated structural constraints, and how their aspirations took shape through lived experience. This process-focused approach, the authors argue, excavates the individual engagements that metric-driven data renders invisible. It is a challenge to an entire industry of employability dashboards and outcome benchmarks that dominate how universities are judged and ranked.

At the theoretical heart of the paper lies a framework borrowed from sociologist Mustafa Emirbayer and professor Ann Mische, whose influential 1998 account of agency describes it as a chordal triad composed of three temporal dimensions. The iterational dimension draws on the past, on routines and habits formed through prior experience. The projective dimension looks forward, toward imagined possible futures. The practical-evaluative dimension operates in the present, as people deliberate and judge amid competing demands and possibilities. Lai and Jung used this temporal lens to trace how students at transnational institutions continually recombine these three elements as their circumstances shift, rather than possessing agency as a stable, once-and-for-all endowment.

The empirical grounding came from the lived experiences of 80 students at two transnational higher education institutions, examined through qualitative thematic analysis. The findings reveal a striking picture of agency in motion. Students’ agentic orientation, the authors report, is informed by past beliefs in meritocracy, by situated deliberations in the present, and by imagined cosmopolitan futures. Many students arrived carrying a deep conviction that hard work would be rewarded, a belief in meritocratic systems that framed their initial aspirations. Yet as they encountered the realities of their institutions and labour markets, this conviction was tested, renegotiated, and sometimes transformed. Agency, in other words, is not a fixed attribute but a trajectory.

Crucially, the study distinguishes between enabled and constrained agency, and this distinction is where the institutional analysis becomes sharp. The dynamic interplay between individual agency and institutional structure shapes students’ capacity to aspire and their strategies of action across time. Some university practices opened possibilities, giving students the resources, networks, and confidence to formulate and pursue ambitious plans. Others closed them down, leaving students to improvise alone against structural headwinds. The researchers interrogate what they call the deterministic role of economic rationalism, the assumption that students are simply rational economic actors who will convert inputs like international curricula and career services into labour market success. The evidence suggests something far more contingent.

That contingency, the authors argue, hinges on three synergistic elements of university practice: ideological, regulative, and socio-emotional. Ideological elements concern the values and narratives an institution transmits about what success looks like and who can achieve it. Regulative elements encompass the formal structures, rules, and provisions that channel student action. Socio-emotional elements involve trust, care, and relational support, the human texture of institutional life. The study’s central argument is that these three elements work together, synergically, to influence how well students prepare for post-graduation life. An institution that supplies resources without cultivating trust, or that preaches cosmopolitan futures without regulative support to pursue them, produces gaps between what students are promised and what they can actually enact.

One of the most consequential findings concerns the internationalisation of higher education itself. The researchers observe that internationalisation is often accompanied by a resource-centric approach, an emphasis on importing curricula, credentials, facilities, and partnerships, while neglecting stakeholders’ internal uptake and conversion process. In the language of the sociological literature the study engages, it is not enough to distribute capital; institutions must attend to how individuals convert that capital into meaningful action. A student surrounded by international resources may still lack the confidence, guidance, or institutional trust needed to translate them into aspiration. This insight echoes a broader critique in the scholarship, including arguments that challenge what some researchers have called the skills fetish, the assumption that packaging skills guarantees employability.

The concept of the capacity to aspire, drawn originally from anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, gives the study its normative ambition. Aspiration, in this view, is not simply an individual daydream but a culturally situated capacity that can be nurtured or starved. For students in transnational institutions, often navigating expectations of global mobility alongside local realities and family obligations, the capacity to aspire becomes a delicate achievement. The study shows how students construct strategies of action across time, adjusting their plans as beliefs in meritocracy collide with structural constraints, and as imagined cosmopolitan futures are weighed against present deliberations. Some students find pathways through; others experience their agency narrowing as graduation approaches.

The implications for universities are direct. The study concludes by urging higher education institutions to create supportive and trust-based environments that cultivate student agency, recognising it as essential for individuals’ long-term development and resilience. This reframing matters for how universities understand their mission. If agency is cultivated rather than merely possessed, then institutional design becomes an exercise in fostering temporal capacities: helping students draw productively on their pasts, deliberate effectively in the present, and project credible futures. It also matters for policy, since systems that evaluate transnational institutions purely on graduate outcomes may reward resource accumulation while ignoring whether students are actually developing the agentic capacities those resources are meant to serve.

The study arrives at a moment when transnational higher education continues its rapid expansion, particularly across China and wider Asia, with branch campuses and Sino-foreign cooperative universities enrolling ever larger cohorts. As the sector matures, questions about quality have shifted from inputs to experiences, and this research pushes that shift further, from experiences to the temporal dynamics of agency that underlie them. Its methodological lesson is equally pointed: graduate outcome data, however sophisticated, cannot capture the intentional engagements that determine whether students flourish. By listening to 80 students describe how their aspirations evolved, Lai and Jung offer a corrective to measurement culture, one that recentres the student as a temporal, deliberating, aspiring person rather than a data point on a destination chart. Whether institutions heed that corrective may shape the next generation of transnational education.

Subject of Research: Student agency and the capacity to aspire in transnational higher education

Article Title: Beyond graduate outcomes: a temporal-agential perspective on students’ capacity to aspire in transnational higher education

Article References: Lai, M., & Jung, J. (2026). Beyond graduate outcomes: a temporal-agential perspective on students’ capacity to aspire in transnational higher education. Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-026-01768-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10734-026-01768-1

Keywords: transnational higher education, student agency, capacity to aspire, graduate outcomes, Emirbayer and Mische, temporal-agential perspective, internationalisation, employability, institutional structure, meritocracy, cosmopolitan futures, Higher Education journal

The study, published in the journal Higher Education by Li Yang and Chuanyi Wang of Tsinghua University and Hugo Horta of the University of Hong Kong, analyzed data from the 2024 China Graduate Student Satisfaction Survey. Of the 10,819 academic PhD students included in the final sample, a striking 92 percent reported participating in at least one research project during their doctoral studies. This near-universal engagement reflects how doctoral training is structured in China, where students typically join a supervisor’s research team and work alongside other PhD and master’s students on funded projects. In 2023 alone, Chinese higher education institutions ran 942,241 science and technology research projects involving 1,235,029 graduate students.

The researchers distinguished between two broad categories of skills. Research skills cover the ability to produce new knowledge, design rigorous experiments, collect and analyze data, write and publish results, and critically evaluate the work of others. Generic skills, sometimes called transferable or soft skills, include communication, leadership, time management, teamwork, networking, and the ability to present, negotiate, and compromise. Both are increasingly seen as essential as growing numbers of PhD graduates move into careers outside academia, where skill mismatches have been documented as a common adjustment problem.

To measure skill development, students rated themselves on a five-point scale for fourteen separate items, seven for research skills and seven for generic skills, comparing their current abilities with where they stood when they began their PhD. The two scales proved highly reliable, and a confirmatory factor analysis supported the two-factor structure. On average, students reported a research skills enhancement score of 2.07 and a generic skills score of 1.83 on a scale where 3 represented great improvement, indicating substantial perceived growth in both domains since starting their programs.

The headline result is that participation matters. After controlling for a wide range of individual, institutional, and behavioral factors, students who participated in research projects rated their research skills enhancement 0.389 units higher, and their generic skills enhancement 0.461 units higher, than comparable students who did not participate. More intriguingly, the benefits accumulated: relative to non-participants, students who joined one, two, three, or four or more projects reported progressively higher gains, rising from 0.282 units for a single project to 0.539 units for four or more in research skills, with a similar pattern for generic skills.

Yet the study adds an important nuance. A single project appeared insufficient to produce a practically meaningful difference, and when the researchers accounted for how satisfied students were with their project participation, much of the apparent benefit of joining many projects faded. Satisfaction with project involvement emerged as the single most powerful factor: a one-unit increase on the five-point satisfaction scale was associated with a 0.519-unit increase in perceived research skills and a 0.560-unit increase in generic skills, effects large enough to account for roughly a third of the unexplained variance. The authors conclude that the subjective experience of participation, feeling challenged, valued, and socially engaged, matters more than the raw number of projects on a CV.

The type of task students performed also played a role, though a smaller one than expected. Among the many tasks tracked, from conducting literature reviews, which 88 percent of participants did, to supportive chores like formatting and reimbursement paperwork, only involvement in research design and data collection showed a statistically significant association with both kinds of skill enhancement. Most other tasks appeared largely irrelevant to perceived skill growth, suggesting that simply being busy within a project is no substitute for meaningful intellectual involvement.

The study also probed whether the apparent benefits might simply reflect student ability. Using the selectivity of the student’s undergraduate university and their number of first-author or corresponding-author publications as proxies, the researchers found mixed and generally weak effects. Each additional publication added only 0.036 and 0.039 units to perceived research and generic skills respectively, accounting for roughly one percent of variance, below the threshold for practical significance. Notably, the benefits of project participation appeared consistent regardless of a student’s academic pedigree, the reputation of their doctoral institution, or whether they had switched disciplines, hinting that research projects may serve as a relatively egalitarian training ground.

Several control variables yielded noteworthy patterns. Female PhD students consistently reported lower perceived skill enhancement than their male peers, echoing earlier findings and the broader literature on self-assessment biases such as the imposter phenomenon. Motivation mattered too, with most students in the sample, 65 percent, citing academic careers as a goal. Students in their fourth year or beyond reported greater gains, an expected pattern given their accumulated experience approaching graduation. Discipline, mode of study, and the extent of disciplinary change between degrees, by contrast, showed little or no association with perceived skill growth.

The authors are careful about the limits of their evidence. The data are cross-sectional, so the associations are correlational rather than causal, and the measures of skill enhancement are self-reported perceptions rather than objective assessments, which may be vulnerable to socially desirable responses. The survey design also prevented the researchers from testing whether a project’s topic aligned with a student’s dissertation. Still, the implications are clear. For doctoral programs searching for ways to broaden graduate skillsets through workshops and internships, the humble research project, done well and done with satisfaction, may already be doing much of that work. The authors recommend that students take part in at least two projects during their PhD, and that supervisors ensure the experience is challenging, collaborative, and genuinely valued, because the feeling of growing may depend as much on how participation feels as on how much of it there is.

Subject of Research: The association between research project participation and perceived research and generic skill enhancement among PhD students in mainland China.

Article Title: The role of research project participation on PhD students perceived skill enhancement

Article References: Yang, L., Wang, C., & Horta, H. (2026). The role of research project participation on PhD students perceived skill enhancement. Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-026-01749-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10734-026-01749-4

Keywords: PhD students, doctoral education, research projects, skill enhancement, generic skills, research skills, satisfaction, higher education, China, graduate training, employability, role