BUV to deliver keynote address alongside Asia-Pacific higher education leaders at QS Higher Ed Summit 2025

At a leading regional platform for higher education dialogue, British University Vietnam (BUV) reaffirmed its commitment to advancing academic excellence, skills development, and international collaboration across the Asia Pacific.

The QS Higher Ed Summit: Asia Pacific 2025, held in Seoul, South Korea, brought together senior leaders, global experts, and representatives from over 100 universities. The summit serves as a major platform for dialogue on educational innovation, transnational education (TNE), and institutional competitiveness.

Professor Rick Bennett delivers one of only three keynote presentations at the QS Higher Ed Summit: Asia Pacific 2025.

This year’s summit, themed “Advancing Generational Potential: Skills and Partnerships in the Asia Pacific,” convened approximately 2,000 delegates, including university leaders, education specialists, global ranking and accreditation organisations, business representatives, and policymakers. The strong attendance reflects the region’s growing emphasis on quality assurance, international benchmarking, and the strategic importance of higher education in the Asia-Pacific landscape.

This year also marks a significant milestone for BUV, as the University continues its streak of excellence by retaining the QS 5-Star rating for the 2025-2028 period, extending its achievement to six consecutive years. This recognition reinforces BUV’s position as one of the region’s leading universities delivering high-quality international education.

BUV awarded QS 5-Star Rating in the period of 2025–2028, extending its achievement to six consecutive years.

Representing BUV, Professor Rick Bennett, Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Vice President, was invited to deliver one of only three keynote presentations at the event, a testament to BUV’s growing influence and leadership in international higher education.

In his keynote, Professor Bennett introduced BUV’s pioneering Triple Quality Framework, which integrates: QS 5-Star international benchmarking, QAA accreditation from the UK, and MOET recognition under Vietnam’s higher education quality assurance system.

This comprehensive framework demonstrates BUV’s unwavering commitment to transparency, accountability, and sustained academic excellence. Aligning global standards with national priorities sets a precedent for delivering world-class British education within Vietnam and contributes to advancing the region’s higher education ecosystem.

This year’s summit convened approximately 2,000 delegates from more than 100 universities.

Professor Bennett also shared insights on talent development, institutional integrity, and future-focused partnerships that empower younger generations to thrive in an increasingly interconnected world, reinforcing BUV’s role as a leader in transnational education in Vietnam.

Below is the full keynote speech delivered by Professor Rick Bennett at the summit:

“I’m going to talk to you about how time-sensitive training constraints can lead to gaining quality assurance and accreditation. Although it may seem time-consuming and often expensive, in fact, these efforts can be hugely advantageous. I’m going to tell you a short story about a pretty young and exciting start-up at the university you’ve been at, or at least you’ve taught at.

When British University Vietnam was established in 2009, it certainly wasn’t an easy time for a start-up. You will recall the global financial crisis, which constrained household expenditure worldwide. And just as a note, in Vietnam at that time, per capita income stood at approximately $1,000 per year, which represented one twelfth of our annual tuition fees.

And our annual tuition fees were likely significantly lower than those in the UK or the US. We faced several hurdles as a start-up at the outset. The concept of transnational education was virtually unknown in the Vietnamese market.

British-style higher education was absent from the Vietnamese educational landscape. There was considerable public scepticism surrounding private international universities. We were one of the first.

Additionally, BVUV faced political competition from Vietnam’s existing universities, which were centuries-old public institutions with excellent reputations and tuition fees that represented approximately 1% of ours, presenting many difficult hurdles to cross. We also confronted a fundamental challenge inherent to all new educational institutions: proving equality.

That’s a keyword. Equality of the intended product before the market had really experienced any outcomes. So, we’re telling them that this is a quality product, but we’ve never seen it.

The answer to this conundrum is clear, yet not simple. Competitive benchmarking. So rather than viewing rigorous quality standards as barriers to entry, we reframed them as navigational guidelines to find a path towards the excellence that our stakeholders were looking for.

And over 15 years of operational history now, we’ve refined what we now term the Triple Quality Framework. It’s a three-level quality assurance system that enables you to measure the quality of higher education through qualitative outcomes. And we view these through three different lenses. Local, which is the country you’re in.

National, the country that you’re representing, in our case, the UK, we offer British education. And then globally, in terms of being recognised as quality standards, such as QS or something similar. I see it’s bigger here in business schools.

In the first year, during the initial development phase, we established a founding mission. Now, our founding mission was to offer an accredited British education here in Vietnam. That was our first mission.

We strategically targeted the first two tiers of our quality assurance, which are at the local and national levels. So, locally, the Ministry of Education and Training in Vietnam. Therefore, we must be invested in, as we’re a foreign-invested university, and we must comply with the Ministry of Education and Training in Vietnam.

They have their own set of standards, which include the six compulsory standards. Things such as governance, teaching, facilities, finance, admissions, and research. And then 20 quantitative and measurable criteria.

Therefore, it gives us legitimacy in our own country. So that’s the first step. The second step is national.

In our case, it’s QAA. If we were at Miami University before, I was at an Australian university in Texas. Regardless of your local quality assurance agency, we also use the QAA.

So, BUV became the first university in not just Vietnam, but in the entire ASEAN region, to achieve QAA accreditation. Not only did we have to achieve accreditation from the QAA, but we also had to get the QAA recognised by the Vietnamese government, which is now being completed. And QAA went to demonstrate compliance with 10 out of the 10 European standards and guidelines, or ESGs.

The QAA, for those who are unfamiliar, is the United Kingdom’s designated quality body, which has accredited some of the world’s most prestigious institutions, including Oxford, Cambridge, LSE, and most universities in the UK. With our dual accreditation strategy, which encompasses both local and national accreditation, we rapidly established our position in Vietnam and within the Vietnamese landscape. As a result, having those two, we now have continuous inclusion in the Ministry of Education and Training’s top-tier institution rankings.

So that’s the local recognition. Additionally, we have the national UK, which has enhanced our trust in our UK partners, facilitating programme expansions. Twelve years ago, when we were a start-up, it was challenging to find partners to work with.

Now they’re coming knocking on our door, because we’re going to do accreditation. So, achieving these first two tiers has successfully embedded in students and the parents, importantly, in their minds that BUV is the first choice when seeking British standard education in Southeast Asia. Now, we proceed to Tier 3, which is why we’re here today.

At the global level, we can take recognition through QS star ratings. As we’ve experienced, Vietnam has seen strong growth in reputation and involvement, with our two and a half thousand students. We recently repositioned our vision to be ranked in the QS top 100 universities in Asia and recognised as Vietnam’s top international university.

Now that’s quite a challenge. On this trajectory, as we complete the third tier of our triple quality framework, achieving a QS 5-star rating at the global level has become an essential strategic value. And three years ago, in 2022, we were the first university in Vietnam to achieve this recognition of quality for a three-year period.

Now, there are now two in Vietnam, but we were still the first. Our recent, and I mean very recent, certification, or recertification of QS 5-star, ensures that we continue to maintain our global quality for the next three years, and also for the world beyond. For our second QS star cycle, we strategically invested in two categories to align with our intended global expansion: diversity and inclusion, and particularly global engagement.

COVID didn’t stop the last global engagement three years ago, but now we’re back on track. When we were preparing for our first certification, these categories were new to us, and we were able to achieve rewarding and sufficient scores. In terms of diversity and global engagement, these are some of the results we now have.

81% of our staff are international faculty with international qualifications. They come from 31 different countries. We now have a progression pathway to 70 partner universities.

We’re represented on five continents in our networks. We’ve got 14 countries participating in student exchange programmes, and partnerships with top reputation and UK Russell River universities, including the University of London, which is our main flagship, and the University of Liverpool and Bristol University, which creates an extraordinarily diverse global exposure ecosystem for ASEAN students studying at the University of East, and positioning us as a gateway university for worldwide opportunities. As I’ve later entered Vietnam’s international higher education sector, we’ve now achieved pioneering positions.

We’re the first university in the SCA to achieve QAA recognition, with formal accreditation from the Vietnamese government. We’re the first university in Vietnam to attain a QS 5-star rating, and most recently, the first university in Vietnam to hold the top position amongst countries with every lay school ranked in the QS Asian rankings tier. That’s our latest achievement, and it’s really important because it unlocks the academic reputation category, which constitutes 30% of the weighting when we submit our QS world rankings.

To remind you of our vision, we aim to be ranked among the QS top 100 universities in Asia and recognised as Vietnam’s top international university. We now have a strategy and key milestones in place for the next 25 years to make this achievable. Let me take you to the walls. To sum up, in 2022, we achieved our first QS 5-star rating, the first in Vietnam.

In 2025, we achieved our QS 5-star rating in the recent education category. In doing so, we achieved our first QS ranking, placing us as the 43rd best business school in Asia for an MBA. By 2030, just five years from now, we aim to achieve a placement in the QS Asia Top 100.

And this will establish our regional leadership and confirm our position as the premier international university in Southeast Asia. And then by 2050, long after my time, we aim to reach the QS world ranking top 100. Now that sounds a bit ambitious.

However, that puts us in a position where we need to be a globally recognised research university to stand alongside the best in the world. Let me put this timeline into perspective. It took us seven years to reach the very first QS rankings level.

And now we have, for the remaining two milestones, 30, which is three times the duration, 25 years. So, our unwavering commitment to consistent, competitive benchmarking through internationally recognised programmes like QS and QAA will help us to achieve this vision. So, we stand on the shoulders of quality assurance bodies, accreditation agencies, and ranking organisations that have created our infrastructure for a global education of excellence.

And this journey is not just about our BUV’s institutional advancement; it’s linked to the Vietnamese national ambition. Our Vietnamese government has set forth a clear vision to position Vietnam as a transnational education hub in Southeast Asia by 2030. And I tell you, when the Vietnamese government decide to do something, they usually get it done.

And increasingly, a key factor in achieving this national vision is the alignment with global quality standards. As the Ministry of Education and Training has emphasised, Vietnam aims to create not just a financial hub, but a knowledge and innovation hub through rigorous adherence to international benchmarks.”