Hanoi (VNA) – The VietnamNational University-Hanoi (VNU) on August 18 launched a higher education comparative rankingsystem developed by Vietnam named “University PerformanceMetrics” (UPM) at an international workshop in Hanoi on August 18.

Addressing the event, which wasjointly organised by VNU and the ASEAN University Network (AUN), Minister of Educationand Training Phung Xuan Nha said Vietnam’s higher education has made strongstrides towards autonomy, enhancing accreditation, publicity of educationquality, and approaching the 4th Industrial Revolution.

So far, as many as 160 Vietnamese higher education institutions and more than300 training programmes have been accredited by prestigious domestic and internationalaccreditation organisations, he noted.

Higher education institutions have been accessing university governance toolsto identify their competence, Nha added.

According to the minister, Vietnam has three educational institutions named inthe list of 1,000 leading education institutions in the world. The country’s higher education is ranked 68thout of nearly 200 countries and territories worldwide.

However, local universities stillshow limitations in operation and management, especially in evaluating andensuring the transparency of the education quality, he said.

Nha stressed the need to have quality management tools in order to improveuniversity governance capacity both at the macro and micro level, especially tocompare quality assurance indicators among higher education institutions.

UPM is a data and analysis centre,which can provide consultancy and support to the national higher educationsystem, as well as to national and regional higher education institutions, hesaid.

Higher education institutions can use UPM to self-evaluate their performance, atthe same time use it as a tool for strategic management, brand development, andpartner development, he went on.

UPM was developed by a research team of VNU under the sponsorship from thenational educational science programme chaired by the Ministry of Education andTraining.

It aims to help higher educationinstitutions to define and manage their strategic goals, towards to standing inthe top 100 universities in Asia.

Nearly 40 universities in Vietnam and in other ASEAN member nations have so farvoluntarily applied the UPM system for quality evaluation.

Executive Director of the ASEAN University Network (AUN) Choltis Dhirathitisaid the Secretariat of AUN supports UPM because the system helps open up a newapproach in the field of university quality evaluation, with eight groups ofcriteria and 54 highly synthetic indicators.

UPM can provide reliable informationserving the comprehensive comparison and evaluation of the quality of universities,he said.

Participants at the workshop discussedissues related to vision and strategy of educational institutions based onindicators of the 4th industrial revolution and sustainabledevelopment, university governance based on social impact assessment,development  of educational ecosystem anddata management platform, among others./.