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A graduate academy in Vietnam has been dubbed a ‘doctorate mill’ after a local man found out that one new student earned a PhD degree from the institution almost on a daily basis in 2015.

Last year, 165 students successfully defended their doctoral theses at the Hanoi-based Graduate Academy of Social Sciences (GASS), according to a Facebook user named Le Truong Tung.

“If only working days are counted, this means the 2015 ‘doctorate production rate’ was one new PhD graduate every one day three hours 55 minutes,” he said in a status update on Thursday.

Tung, who according to his Facebook profile works at FPT University, said the GASS admits 350 new PhD students in each of the years 2015 and 2016.

“In the next few years, suppose that some students will fail to graduate, we will have some 300 new doctors a year, closer to the one new doctor per day rate,” he commented.

Trung also listed several links to the GASS website as the reference for his statistics.

Among them is a link to a list of articles about the successfully defended dissertations at the GASS, some of which are said to have addressed amusing subjects, or those that are deemed too ‘silly’ to be explored in a doctoral thesis.

Some of the thesis subjects most shared on Facebook are “The properties of communication between a commune-level chairman and his citizens,” “The flattering behavior in the Vietnamese language,” and “Passive sentences in English and methods to translate them into Vietnamese.”

GASS response

The rapped academy did not wait for long to respond to critics.

On Friday morning, less than 24 hours after the viral post surfaced on Facebook, the academy held a media meeting in Hanoi to defend its training program and the thesis titles.

The GASS director, Professor Vo Khanh Vinh, explained to reporters that his academy has 36 doctoral fields and enrolls 350 PhD students every year, according to newswire VietNamNet.

This means there are fewer than ten students for each of the training fields, the academy director said.

“Some fields are very important to the country, and our enrollment target in fact remains modest,” he said.

In the meantime, Nguyen Van Hiep, head of the Institute of Linguistics, a GASS subsidiary, said it is not a waste of time to address such subjects as the flattering behavior in the Vietnamese language or the communication properties of a commune-level chairman.

Hiep said the “flattering behavior” dissertation has “a great impact on our society.”

“We have to understand flattering behavior to stop people from behaving that way,” he said.

Vu Dung, head of the Institute of Psychology, another institution under the GASS umbrella, said thesis subjects do not necessarily have to sound serious and significant.

“It is totally wrong [to think so],” he said.

Dung added he has been to 20 countries, visiting dozens of universities around the globe, so he knows what people in developed countries study for their doctorate degrees.

“There are thesis subjects about the act of writing on toilet walls or spitting on the street,” he said. “These subjects are considered nonsense in Vietnam, but seen as very practical in other countries.”