2 Powerful Vietnamese Women Build Private Universities

Charismatic as well as politically astute, Ton Nu Thi Ninh is a patient woman--up to a point. As a high-ranking member of Vietnam's Communist Party, and regarded as the most powerful woman in the country, she had to be. But for far too long Ms. Ninh has watched the abysmal state of Vietnam's higher education handicap the country's future potential. Rather than performing triage on the public-university system, she is using her connections and powers of persuasion to raise the funds and bring in the people to build a new private university from the ground up. A former ambassador, Ms. Ninh is crisscrossing the globe to drum up financial support and academic expertise for Tri Viet University. Meanwhile, Dang Thi Hoang Yen, one of the richest women in Vietnam, is just as impatient as Ms. Ninh, and just as persuasive in her own way. Working with international investors, Ms. Yen saw close up that Vietnam's universities were producing unemployable graduates. She bought a large plot of land outside Ho Chi Minh City, hired architects to draw up the plans for a campus to eventually enroll 20,000 students, and appointed Mark S. Scheid, a former director of international programs at Rice University, to be the first president of Tan Tao University.