The data is unambiguous. According to the Vietnam Migration Profile 2023, released by the Consular Department under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in October 2024, an estimated 70 to 80% of self-funded Vietnamese students remain abroad after graduating.

The reason isn't mysterious. A Vietnamese semiconductor graduate in Taiwan starts at US$950-1,250 a month, rising to $1,400-$2,100 with a master's or doctorate. Vietnam's average labor income for 2025 was VND8.4 million ($319), according to the General Statistics Office.

Vietnamese students are now spread across most of the world's major destination markets, with nearly 86,000 in South Korea, 44,000 in Australia, 43,000 in Japan, more than 30,000 in the U.S., 27,000 in China and 17,000 in Canada. A growing share aren't coming back.

Yet families read news stories about returnees struggling. Billions of dong invested, salaries of VND13-25 million ($494-$950) on offer back home, and many treat this as evidence of a bad decision. I don't think it is. I think it's evidence of poorly calibrated expectations.

Vietnamese employers do value foreign degrees. A 2018-2019 British Council survey of 150 businesses in Vietnam found that 85% of employers said overseas study gave graduates an advantage in job-hunting and salary. But the premium is modest. A young person who left at 18, spent four to six years inside a different system, and returns expecting their degree to compound into immediate seniority is measuring against the wrong benchmark. The labor market today does not pay for foreign degrees. It pays for capability: working skills, real experience, the ability to adapt. None of these appears automatically because someone studied abroad.

This is the conversation I keep having with parents. If your goal is for your child to work overseas, the calculation is different from the start. Choice of major, choice of country, financial preparation for a journey longer than four years: all matter far more than going somewhere because everyone else is going.

If your goal is for them to come home, you have to be honest about what they're coming home to. A returnee with no real work experience is competing with locally trained graduates who already have it. The result is predictable.

The first two or three years after returning are not, in my experience, the failure they appear to be. They are a transitional period. Anyone who changes their living environment needs time to reorient, let alone someone who has spent years inside a completely different system. I have watched many returnees struggle through three difficult years and then build stable, well-paying careers over the next seven. If you measure them at year three, the story is failure. If you measure them at year ten, it's a profitable investment.

The biggest mistake families make isn't sending their children abroad. It's expecting immediate returns. We are trying to measure a decade-long journey with a six-month yardstick. Starting salary is the wrong instrument.

Studying abroad is not a ticket to a transformed life. With clear expectations and proper preparation, it remains one of the most worthwhile decisions a family can make. The brain drain figures aren't a verdict on whether the investment was sound. They are the result of an unforgiving wage chasm, and of young people making rational decisions about where their education is best valued.