During the 1990s Viet Nam's higher education system underwent comprehensive reorganisation: tuition fees were introduced, academic curricula reorganised, and small universities merged in order to create bigger academic institutions. Within the reform process launched by the Doi Moi in the field of higher education, progressive privatisation and internationalisation are considered by the government to be the most significant reforms for the future development of the university sector. As a result, Vietnamese higher education has progressively opened up to new international and private actors, and today three types of higher education provider exist in Viet Nam: public national universities, private national universities, and private international universities. This thesis seeks to explain how university choice decisions are made by a sample of young people in Hanoi, and it also seeks to throw light on the related family educational strategies. More precisely, this thesis concerns the way in which the major transformations of internationalisation and privatisation affect the university choice of the students in question.