The placing of Vietnamese universities in prestigious global rankings has continually been on the rise in recent times despite the country’s much shorter history in terms of higher education.

Vietnam's university education moving up in international rankings.

On a list of 10,000 universities in Asia from the Quacquarelli Symonds Education Organisation (QS) were seven from Vietnam in 2018, eight in 2020, and 11 in 2021.

The top 500 in Asia in 2018 saw the Vietnam National University, Hanoi (HNU), the Vietnam National University Ho Chi Minh City (VNUHCM), the Hanoi University of Science and Technology (HUST), Can Tho University, Hue University, and the University of Da Nang. Ton Duc Thang University and Duy Tan University were also added to the top 500 in 2019 and 2020, respectively.

This year, three more Vietnamese universities were named among the 634 best higher education institutions in Asia by QS: the Hanoi Pedagogical University, the Industrial University of Ho Chi Minh City, and the University of Economics Ho Chi Minh City.

The QS 2020 rankings by field have four Vietnamese universities in the global top 600: HUST, HNU, VNUHCM, and Can Tho University. VNUHCM and Can Tho University appeared in the rankings for the first time.

The major of computer science and information systems at VNUHCM ranked in the 551-600 group globally. Can Tho University’s agriculture and forestry majors were in the top 251-300, while HNU saw the majors of maths, physics, astronomy, and computer science and information systems ranked.

HUST had four groups of majors in the top 400 and 500, including electrical engineering - electronics, mechanical engineering, aviation and manufacturing, computer science and information systems, and mathematics. Among them, all three majors in the fields of engineering and information technology increased between 50 and 100 places compared to 2019’s rankings and remained at the top in Vietnam.

With mathematics, this was also the first time Vietnam had two universities in the global top 500.

The QS 2020 rankings also put HNU and VNUHCM in the group of the 1,000 best universities in the world.

Vietnam had 172 higher education institutions in the Webometrics rankings (2020 version) from Cybermetrics Labs under the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), released in January 2020, or 38 more than in 2019.

For the first time, Vietnam had three universities ranked in the prestigious Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2019: HUST, HNU, and VNUHCM.

It also had 12 universities in the University Rankings by Academic Achievement (URAP) in 2020, an increase of four compared to the previous year.