Introduction

Surveying the discourse on Vietnamese higher education, human capital development remains an important aspect of the country’s potentials and futures. The higher education sector plays a key role in these realisations undoubtedly. Vietnamese Prime Minister Phạm Minh Chính has repeatedly stated the importance of human capital development as a national and regional priority, with efforts needed in the education sector to ‘build strategies and plans, institutions and mechanisms, and standards and criteria’ (VietNam News, 2021; VietnamPlus, 2021a, 2021b). Similarly, the business community in Vietnam has supported the necessity of human capital development through education as an important aspect of social and economic development (Dinh, 2018; Duong, 2019; Phuong, 2021; Tran et al., 2021). The importance of higher education and its relationship to human capital raises the matter of who the constituents of human capital might be. This ontological consideration precedes economic and social potentials through ‘who’ rather than ‘what’ can be considered human capital. The concepts we use to identify or describe large groups of persons can inadvertently obscure the complexities of such categorisations.

My aim with this chapter is to discuss the importance of higher education students, not as an abstract category, but as key players in the development of potentials and futures within the institutional setting of the academy. I make use of the phrase ‘potentials and futures’ in the plural here to designate the multiplicity of opportunities available to these students and other stakeholders of the higher education ecosystem. I reassert openness and contingency of the future based on the unstable nature of modernity as a historical and social condition (Felix, 2020, 2021b). The COVID-19 pandemic is just one of several other global events that have only accentuated this instability, as I have also argued elsewhere (Felix, 2021a). Students make up the most sizable number of persons at any educational institution worldwide. As significant as university students are in Vietnam, they remain an under-researched sector of the local population.

Existing studies on higher education in Vietnam do not typically focus on students directly, but rather on the functioning of academic and administrative systems within universities. A handful of scholars have observed the dearth of student-centred, education-based research in Vietnam (Nghia & Tran, 2021; Tran, 2020, 2022). Few make explicit mention of issues regarding student agency (Pham, 2019, 2020; Phạm, 2020; Tran & Bui, 2021; Tran et al., 2022), as greater emphasis is placed on the institutional structures students inhabit, rather than agency they exercise as subjects (Nghia et al., 2020). In this chapter, I argue that higher education students represent the potentials and futures of Vietnam in developing its modern, post-industrial ambitions. Moreover, I contend that the social identities of students understood as ‘the category and attributes that experience proves’ (Smith, 2006, p. 85) are crucial to the potentials and futures of higher education in Vietnam and beyond.

Throughout this chapter, I raise reflexive questions concerning higher education stakeholders. I do so with a view of extending the traditional concept of human capital in order to rethink issues of higher education policy and practice. It is needful, I offer, to avoid the conceptual trappings that come with discussing a substantial number of persons who constitute a particular group. My aim in this chapter is not to explicitly state what the social identities of higher education students in Vietnam are at present or what they should be. In contrast, the purpose of this chapter is to make a case for the importance of human capital through higher education by considering how students are conceptualised. If the language of Vietnamese higher education policy discourse conceptualises learners as passive or deprioritises their role as change agents—what kind of future can we expect?

Generalising Students

The expanded understanding of human capital I offer later in this chapter is drawn from scholars of Vietnamese higher education. While much of their work does not directly engage with the topic of human capital, they highlight the significance of student identity, while not explicitly stating the concept (Pham, 2019, 2020; Phan, 2017; Tran, 2013, 2015, 2016). My contribution to offering an expanded understanding of human capital as a concept considers student identity as an important aspect of how this develops through higher education policy and practice. Student identity is important, partly because of the significance of both the role of education and identity as separate topics within various disciplines across the spectrum of the humanities and social sciences (Brooks et al., 2013; Gleason, 2018). While sociologists of both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have engaged with the notion of identity (Turner, 2010), Ervin Goffman’s work is some of the most cited and influential on the topic (Burns, 1992; Goffman, 1956; Rousseau, 2014; Smith, 2006; Turner, 2014). For Goffman, identity has to do with the ways persons are identified or categorised, which includes the attributes an individual may have in a personal or contextual sense (Smith, 2006). Conceptual precision regarding the notion of student identity can mitigate problematic generalisations that emerge when engaging with sizeable demographics.

An example of problems inherent in generalisations was evident in the early twentieth century when the emerging phenomena of people’s engagement with the mass media became an area of scholarly interest. At this time, particularly in Western countries, the ‘effects tradition’ began formation as sociologists and other researchers turned their attention to the mass media’s effect on audiences, which resulted in the widespread notion of audiences as a homogeneous mass whose engagement with the media was direct, uniform and uncontested (Park & Pooley, 2008; Pooley, 2021). Thinkers such as Raymond Bauer, Joseph Klapper, Russell Neuman and Lauren Guggenheim made important contributions towards this understanding. Yet, their influence is only overshadowed by the popularity of persons such as Harold Lasswell in addition to critical theorists such as Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse and others from the Institute for Social Research, better known as The Frankfurt School (Littlejohn et al., 2017). During the late to mid-twentieth century, scholars such as Stuart Hall challenged essentialist notions of audiences by highlighting individual agency, its collective functioning and the situatedness of audiences (Durham & Kellner, 2006). This wave of research for this period onward was underlined by the importance of social identity in shaping one’s agency and practical outcomes. It was no longer reasonable to talk about audiences while overlooking how their social identities contributed to their engagement with the media.

I argue that students are hardly conceptualised in education research in Vietnam with the same nuance that people now regard ‘audiences’ as a conceptual category in other disciplines. The historic shift in both academic and market-based research on the mass media in moving away from the ‘passive audience’ view of human subjects to the ‘active audience’ view did not happen on its own (Griffith, 2012; Jensen, 2021). Among the many reasons that can be offered for the departure from and discrediting of the ‘magic bullet’ or ‘hypodermic needle’ view of the media, was that an overgeneralisation was offered, in part due to quantitative analysis (Barker, 2004; Grossberg, 2010). The result was a reductionist view of people’s complex engagement with equally complex texts, processes and political economies which in turn led to this issue of abstraction. Higher education research in Vietnam has the likelihood of oversimplification if scholars within the humanities and social sciences do not actively challenge disciplinary stagnancy which might masquerade as epistemic certainty (Nguyen & Hutnyk, 2020).

Citizenship, Social Mobility and Workforce Development

Persons’ attainment of higher education, I posit, is intimately related to the concept of human capital. This is generally understood in economic terms concerning persons’ labour productivity based on their learning or skills development. Human capital is an important aspect of modern education institutions at all levels as scholars have linked this aspect of higher education institutions to twentieth-century developments in the economics of labour within industrialised, often market-oriented states as an outcome of the social and historic condition of modernity with roots in seventeenth-century Enlightenment ideas (Bhambra, 2007; Nghia et al., 2020). In contrast to the standard definitions of human capital that exist (Holborow, 2012; Martin, 2019; Nafukho et al., 2004), I here provide an extension to this concept. Specifically, I advance that human capital pertains to the capabilities of individuals and groups, expressed via their knowledge, skills, experiences, and outputs and how this corresponds with the intersections of citizenship, social mobility, and workforce development (Kataoka et al., 2020; Pretorius & Macaulay, 2021; The World Bank Group, 2020; Tomlinson, 2017). There is a warrant for the expansion of human capital as a concept and I will offer a brief justification.

Firstly, while the concept of human capital has been observed by scholars as being inherently flawed in several respects, no suitable alternatives exist to supplant the concept altogether (Martin, 2019; Nafukho et al., 2004; Tan, 2014; Tran et al., 2021). This explains its enduring use in economic and policy-based discourses the world over. Next, human capital development typically entails persons’ educational attainment, which is always situated within bounded systems. In this regard, education practice occurs within a defined social and historical context and in the case of higher education, the nation-state is usually the primary locus for analysing or deconstructing modern education systems. It is also difficult to disassociate matters of citizenship whenever reference is made to any nation-state. This is especially the case because higher education functions as a socialising agent within modern societies which are primarily organised through the structure of the nation-state (Brannen & Nilsen, 2005; Trinidad et al., 2021). Lastly, class distinctions play a key role in the educational participation of individuals and groups especially given the correlation between one’s educational attainment and  various capitals that are accrued in the process, such as social, economic and cultural capital (Johnes, 2019; Mccaig & Mccaig, 2018; Mok & Jiang, 2018). Furthermore, education plays a role in determining one’s position in the class-based hierarchies of modern societies.

Many students in Vietnam internally migrate for the purpose of education (Gavonel, 2017; UNESCO et al., 2018). The cost–benefit of migration for these students relates to the sense of upward mobility to be gained because of their social participation in educational attainment (Gavonel, 2017; Phan & Doan, 2020a). Throughout 2020 to the present, Vietnam has also seen another kind of reverse migration, this time by university students studying overseas. This included persons who had their studies curtailed as a result of the pandemic, or others who completed their course of studies and decided to return home (Kim & Trong, 2020; Long, 2020; Van Nguyen et al., 2020; Phan, 2021; Phan & Thanh, 2020). My previous work briefly explored the possibilities of these education migrants and their role in human capital development as defined earlier. I raised questions regarding how local teaching and learning be affected by the return of so many foreign-educated expatriates and how local higher education institutions might equip current and future students with resilience and relevance for the post-COVID-19 world (Felix, 2021a). However, I also ask how these individuals might reintegrate into local society with capitals that can be mobilised. What potentials and futures lay on the horizon for Vietnamese higher education?

Potentials and Futures

The idea of potentials and futures point towards desirable and disadvantageous ends as equally viable outcomes. As mentioned earlier, a great deal of research on Vietnamese higher education overlooks students who are the central focus of this ecosystem. Few scholars identify the primacy of their perspectives in teaching and learning reforms, including other areas of education policy and practice (Nghia & Tran, 2021; Tran, 2020). Students are the driving force of higher education and the actors who will make the potentials and futures of Vietnam a reality. There is great value in engaging with this demographic and much is at stake if they are overlooked or misapprehended. From a total national population of upwards of 100 million persons, higher education students stand at an estimated number of over 2 million persons (Kataoka et al., 2020; Le, 2022). There are a few key points that can be raised regarding the significance of both universities and the students who populate them.

Firstly, university students in Vietnam are an important demographic, especially given the sheer number of higher education institutions in Vietnam. Varying estimates are approximately upwards of 220 since 2015 (Truong et al., 2021), with a documented total exceeding 420 from this period, comprising both State-run and private institutions (Nguyen & Tran, 2019; Phan & Doan, 2020a). Secondly, Vietnamese higher education students are meant to exceed the current figures of ‘highly skilled’ or ‘trained workers’ and contribute to the growth of both national and global talent indexes. Since the turn of the century, investment in education has increased remarkably in Vietnam, through local–foreign partnerships and other homegrown ventures, to bolster the national workforce, innovation and labour productivity (Nguyen & Tran, 2018, 2019; Tran & Marginson, 2018). Thirdly, the value of university students lies not only in their sizeable numbers but also in what might have been considered to be the ‘promise of education’ as realised through this demographic (van’t Land et al., 2021; Yinger, 2005). This realisation is partly due to the productive uses of their knowledge, skills, experiences, creativity and more in the face of challenges and opportunities that characterise this stage in late modernity in Vietnam and the world over.

Global metrics on Vietnam situate higher education as important concerning the notion of human capital in the traditional sense, but also in the alternative view which I elaborate later in this chapter. Traditional notions of human capital in the literature entail one’s capacity to earn an income through productive means (Ray et al., 2022), and the relationship between schooling, literacy and employment (Llorca-Jaña et al., 2022). Human capital while being a predominantly quantitative concept is challenging to measure empirically (Diebolt & Hippe, 2022). This is because there are ‘many different possibilities to measure human capital’, however, scholars commonly opt for an ‘education-based approach’ in their measurement (Diebolt & Hippe, 2022, p. 10). A 2020 report on human capital in Vietnam notes that ‘as Vietnam’s economy grows, it needs to invest more in higher levels of education and lifelong learning to ensure students exit the system with the knowledge and skills relevant to labour market needs’ (Kataoka et al., 2020, p. 6). The 2020 Human Capital Index observes that in countries like Vietnam ‘human capital development has not yet matched the potential that one would anticipate, given these countries’ wealth’ (The World Bank Group, 2020). The 2023 Global Talent Competitiveness Index ranks Vietnam 75 out of 133 nations, considering a range of factors, including those related to higher education (Lanvin et al., 2023). Local metrics tell a similar story as a 2019 labour force survey highlighted that young Vietnamese accounted for over 42% of unemployed workers (Truc, 2021).

The Promise of Education for Vietnamese Students

Other local studies on Vietnamese youth feature a very interesting picture. Such findings tell of a disconnect between the intention and actuality of higher education, but also the actuality and potential of the students (British Council, 2020; Nguyen, 2020; Sen, 2019). For these individuals, their social participation in education attainment may be seen as complicated discourses of engagement and disengagement. A major 2020 study by the British Council spotlighted some of these entanglements as part of its Next Generation research report series, highlighting young people in Vietnam (British Council, 2020). In this study, Vietnamese youth generally had a positive view of educational attainment, however, this would be influenced by future opportunities, parental approval and personal interest. At the same time, the research data revealed a market-oriented sensibility regarding the value of education. Sustainable career-related concerns were a matter of interest, particularly in meeting the demands of living in the twenty-first century and in the age of Industry 5.0.

Most participants in this study identified as ‘feel(ing) disconnected from broader, national issues’ (British Council, 2020, p. 66) and a sense of detachment regarding their civic engagement. I believe this correlates with changing attitudes regarding individualistic versus communal lifestyle choices as a possible result of the influence of globalisation and the erasure of tradition under the ethos of modernity (Duara, 2015; Weiming, 2014). Vietnamese youth, many of whom are higher education students, are part of Vietnam’s efforts in human capital development. The progress and well-being of these individuals and the institutions they are affiliated with are inextricably linked to the trajectory of the nation socially, culturally, politically and otherwise. What I would like to point out is that there is no reason to believe that educational attainment and educational engagement are synonymous. If market-oriented sensibilities are common and young people in this context report an experience of detachment from broader issues as these occur within the local society, what might this tell us about the socialising work of higher education? Is it reasonable to believe that the potentials and futures regarding higher education can materialise without connection to the entanglements of Vietnamese youth?

With the so-called ‘promise of education’ in Vietnam, the potentials and futures to emerge from this new state of affairs is yet to be seen. Post-Doi Moi, post-COVID-19 and post-global Vietnam, is a Vietnam with an open view of the world and a watching world looking back at Vietnam all the same. Higher education matters in this setting not only because of what education does but also because of what it represents. Undoubtably the COVID-19 pandemic has been a world-changing event that presents another range of challenges and opportunities for higher education across the world, including Vietnam, as research into Vietnamese higher education has been of considerable interest to both local and international scholars alike for several years (London, 2021; Nguyen & Shah, 2019; Phan & Doan, 2020b; Phan et al., 2019; Statista, 2021; Tran, 2018; Tran & Marginson, 2018). The impact of this pandemic is unprecedented as it has made an indelible mark on what can still be considered the early years of the twenty-first century, leading to what might be considered a recalibration of priorities and outcomes as the world comes to terms with disruption and instability characterise the ‘new normal’ as a present-continuous situation.

The Value of Higher Education in the Post-COVID-19 World

While institutions of higher education across the globe have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic in very different ways based on an array of factors, each response, I again argue, is underpinned by revisiting the notion of values (Felix, 2021a). Or perhaps, the notion of values has become much more prominent due to the destabilising nature of the seemingly never-ending public health concerns brought about by the pandemic in addition to other instances sociopolitical unrest across the globe? Years before the COVID-19 virus became a day-to-day reality, scholars of education have discussed the importance of values that underpin higher education theory and practice (Harland & Pickering, 2011; Kay et al., 2010). Thinkers have long envisaged futures for higher education beyond the neoliberal agenda. Their visions were underpinned by seeing education as a holistic human transformation rather than a commodity. Harland and Pickering (2011) argue that values are inseparable from social practices and the academy and its stakeholders might ‘ask challenging questions about what is a good society and what is of quality in human nature’ (p. 100). Such questions consider the role of university students and their relationship to the kind of good a society might see beyond their participation in the workforce.

For universities in the post-COVID-19 world, the question of values becomes increasingly important in three specific ways. Firstly, there is the question of what might be the value of higher education in the post-COVID-19 world. Next, what may be the core values fostered by higher education institutions? Finally, what kinds of values are generated by the recipients of higher education—this being students? My use of the term, ‘values’ has been a subject featured in previous work and could also be understood again here in two distinct ways (Felix, 2021a). The first has to do with the negotiation of priorities or ideas held in high regard. Originating from this, the second distinction involves the more tangible outcomes of the former, better understood as value creation. I believe that both are important in making sense of the social practice of higher education. Harland and Pickering (2011) state ‘(t)he idea of the university is thus important because it has potential as a powerful shaping force in society’ (p. 101). Potentials and futures can make for a better Vietnam in time to come or an impending reality that is far worse than the present.

A nation’s education system is a major social institution in any modern society being more than providing skills for employment (Brooks et al., 2013; Ma & Cai, 2021; Rousseau, 2014). A skills-oriented or occupation-focussed conception of higher education is pervasive, to say the least. However, this is a problematic paradigm for framing education policy and practice. There is more to education than workplace competence. Education is important in the development of citizenship and in helping individuals and groups attain greater social mobility (Bergan & Damian, 2010; Pham & Saltmarsh, 2013). There is also good reason for higher education to be reframed as a systemic approach to human capital development, considering the ways in which citizenship and social mobility are part of this process. As societies across the globe face the realities of the post-COVID world, it is worth considering who exactly will be navigating this unchartered territory. Student-focussed research is less common in higher education literature in Vietnam, with one local scholar noting ‘(t)he perspectives of students are important in the context of VHE, where top-down approaches and centralisation in curriculum and assessment predominate. It provides insights into the contemporary situation of teaching and learning in VHE from a ground-up perspective’ (Tran, 2020). Literature on Vietnamese higher education focuses on areas of policy and practice with few studies connected with the idea of student identity. I believe here opportunity lies in equipping university students for post-COVID-19 realities, but in terms of the way we think about them in the first place.

Conclusions

At the start of this chapter, I referred to the work of Nghia and Tran (2021) as their research explored student experiences in teaching and learning reforms in Vietnamese higher education. In closing this chapter, I would like to draw on some of their insights which correspond with my contribution here; these insights are significant insofar as students are presented in high resolution, with a degree of texture that aids in reinforcing the importance of student identity in higher education policy and practice. Nghia and Tran (2021) note the following key points:

Voices of students, being the youngest and the least powerful among internal stakeholders in higher education, are often not heard of in decision making, even for those changes that directly affect them such as teaching and learning reforms…All of the teaching and learning reforms in Vietnamese higher education reported in this book, and possibly also the case of many higher education systems in the world now, converge at one point: shifting the leading role in and responsibility for learning to students. Indeed, in higher education and other levels of education, students are the key agents of their learning process because they learn for themselves (pp. 248–249).

While student voices are important, I posit that preceding this is what or who we understand students to be in the first place. As key agents within the higher education ecosystem, I assert the ways in which students are conceptualised have immense implications for higher education policy and practice. The identities of students are an important aspect of human capital in the social practice of higher education that I have aimed to argue here. I believe it is misguided to think of education in general and higher education specifically as an automatic or autonomous process. Engaging with matters of human agency and the discourses at work in any sociohistorical context shapes the articulation of higher education. It is a gross misstep to think of human capital development in terms of numbers, metrics, policies and strategies and overlook the largest group of persons who constitute the higher education ecosystem—that being students. Research on student identity in Vietnam is a starting point for new discourses on sustainable human capital development in the post-COVID-19 world.

I maintain that the ‘idea’ of who or what a student might be in general and/or as a defined group, in the case of Vietnamese higher education students, is important to consider. Peterson (2021) observed that ‘(t)he use of single terms implicitly hypersimplifies what are extraordinarily diverse and complex phenomena’ (p. 169). Abstractifying students as a conceptual category is unhelpful in the critical work needed in researching this demographic as with any other (Peterson, 2021; Sowell, 2012). When large demographics are the focus of any research endeavour, I believe there is a common temptation to draw sweeping conclusions without regard for nuance. Such an approach may be fitting concerning some aspects of the shared reality human beings inhabit. Yet, it is problematic to overlook factors of geographic, historical, cultural and social distance which account for finer distinctions in research findings and subsequent conceptualisations. Even before Peterson (2021), for several years Sowell (2012) warned of the dangers of reductionism in seeing people through the convenience of abstractions. It is easier to think of students as a homogenous and compliant group without difference or nuance than to consider the relationship between their social identity and the agency they might exercise within a particular setting. The development of sociological frames of references through the likes of demographics, psychographics and birth cohorts demonstrates that human subjects are far too complex to be uncritically aggregated en masse in modern societies (Parry & Urwin, 2011; Thi et al., 2021). In my view, abstractions are premised upon generalisations and oversimplifications, which are certain errors to be avoided, if one looks back at early twentieth-century history as I have outlined earlier.

As mentioned before, students typically outnumber teaching and administrative staff in a higher education environment. I believe it is worth considering factors and forces that shape student identity and how this might relate to the social structure of a university environment. The role, significance and formation of student identity as observed by scholars is an important aspect of human capital—particularly as this relates to the ‘promise of education’ as some scholars point out—which entails ‘preparing people for life and work’ (Brown et al., 2020, p. 132). The potentials and futures of higher education and human capital in Vietnam can be realised sustainably by acknowledging the importance of concepts used to define present and future realities. It is problematic to conceptualise students in abstract terms. With a problematic conceptual starting point, there is also the potential for undesirable social outcomes, such as low labour productivity or a lack of civic engagement. The neoliberalisation of higher education and the overemphasis on occupational competence pose a challenge to how students are conceptualised, which in turn undermines the potentials and futures of the societies to which they belong. The higher education students of Vietnam today are the potentials and futures for the nation in time to come. Who do we believe or imagine these university students to be?