FPT University

FPT University is a private information technology university in Hà Nội, Vietnam, established in 2006. The name comes from that of the managing organisation, the Corporation for Financing and Promoting Technology, or FPT for short. It is the first private university to be opened in Vietnam. They aimed to recruit 500 students for their first class. Trương Gia Bình was named as chairman of the management board, while Le Truong Tung will serve as the first dean.

All instructors would be required to have two years' working experience in the IT industry, and have to sit for an entrance examination. Foreign language teaching would form an integral part of the curriculum, and they aim to recruit native-speaking foreign language teachers and subject area teachers. After one year of language preparation, a foreign language would be used as the medium of instruction for all courses. English would not be the only such language used; the Vietnam Software Association are working with the school's embedded software faculty to establish a programme in Japanese language.

Loans for students are provided by the Bank for Investment and Development of Vietnam, which will also provide 50 full scholarships. International Data Group chairman Patrick McGovern also pledged during his 14 July 2007 visit to the university to give 100 FPT students full scholarships to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology within the next five years. Microsoft, which is a strategic partner of the managing organization FPT, have an arrangement with the university to offer training to their students on Microsoft technologies. At US$11,200 for the four-year course of study, the university's fees are extremely high, especially when compared to the US$720 cost of four years at a public university. However, in addition to the high quality of instruction promised by the university, FPT have also committed to hiring all of their university's graduates at a salary of US$200–400 per month, in order to fill their own demand for 15,000 staff by 2013.

The fight to gain permission to open the university itself represented a rarity in Vietnam; the Ministry of Education were originally unwilling to grant permission for the university to be opened, and delayed for two months the necessary approval for the university to begin enrolling students. FPT used the media to put pressure on the Ministry, which eventually signed the official approval document on 15 November 2006.

The University currently runs a collaborative program with the University of Greenwich, UK. The off-site Top-up +2, which commenced in August, 2009, is a collaborative program between the University of Greenwich in the U.K. and FPT University in Vietnam and this is currently the only program in Vietnam that awards Aptech graduates a U.K. bachelors’ degree in only 1 year.