PurposeThis paper aims to provide an overall picture of Vietnamese international student mobility which remains silent in Vietnamese international education and migration research.Design/methodology/approachThis paper traces the evolvement of Vietnamese student outflows in a historical approach by analyzing official documents published by governmental agencies, public media and international education and migration literatures.FindingsWhile the early Vietnamese student movements from the early 20th century to the 1986 Open Door period were mostly shaped by political purposes, the current trend is influenced by social and political transformations in Vietnam and host countries and by changes in the practices of higher education internationalization policies in host countries. It also argues that the present movement of Vietnamese students, which is seen as the government's strategic approach to improve the quality of the existing workforce for their industrialization process by 2020, becomes politicized as human capital is recognized as the focal force for the country's development and global integration.Originality/valueBy analyzing the factors behind Vietnamese international student mobility, the paper hopes to contribute an understanding of the international student movements and professional migration in Vietnam which are still under‐researched.

While modernism with its principles lying in reason and metanarratives was commended for rationalism and absolute truth yielded in science and technology, postmodernism rejects scientific achievements which have brought both benefits and disasters to life and widened social stratification. It describes a rejection of such fundamental Western philosophies as Euro-centricism, metaphysics, authoritarianism and domination. It denies the existence of objective knowledge, the consistence of the self and rationalism. On the one hand, the reality we live in is said to be full of holes with scientific establishments with which scientists have created for a better life, and on the other in views of ethics many of us have become skeptical about the unique existence of truth. Higher education no longer seeks the unity of culture and consensus of communal communication, but accepts to challenge itself to criticisms and to swim in global competition flows. Knowledge from universities which has both lost its ivory power and broken its science-exclusive preserving border becomes functional when students aim to ingest what they want to ingest as they find it useful for their global civic participation. Universities must consequently become a pioneering cradle in the production of new knowledge for society and human beings, and they are mandated to provide global-adaptive knowledge to global moving students. While modernist education tried to educate students for citizenship and fixed jobs, postmodernist education is believed to train them for uncomfortable uncertainties and the ability to live with chaos. Postmodernism changes our mindset. It changes higher education.

This paper adds nuance to existing human capital theory by critiquing the rationality principle underpinning this theory that leads to the disembodiment of skills and knowledge. Accordingly, individual investment in education is said to be rationally calculated on a cost‐and‐benefit basis, and a collective of individual skills and knowledge enables social development. In contrast, by using the Heideggerian perspective of engagement with the world, it is argued in this article that such decisions can be affected and reshaped by individuals’ embodied interactions with others under the effects of socio‐political norms and practices. As such, investment in education and training and its outcomes are socially and politically shared and enacted. This argument is supported by an examination of the evolving human capital policies in Vietnam that disembody human capital from individuals’ embeddedness in the world. In Vietnam, human capital is considered as a diplomatic, political, economic, and innovative commodity for socioeconomic development and participation in global competition for talent. This public commodity is collective, symbolic, and quantifiable. This disembodied commodity is produced through a joint‐venture effort among individuals, the Vietnamese Government's exercise of multilateralism, other governments, and foreign universities.

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There have been a lot of debates over the relationality between spatiality and temporality in extant migration research. In terms of space, several strands of research have focused on exploring migrants’ strategies for migration and relocation, implicitly considering migration as a complete sojourn. However, migrants tend to establish and maintain transnational ties across spaces, making migration an on-going process. Others have examined how migrants sustain transnational activities and relationships over time. Migration, in the latter sense, becomes a complex process involving multiple times and spaces. Migrants’ mobilities are shaped and reshaped by their past memories, present relocation experiences, and aspirations for the future, as well as the influences of the immobilities of others and things across spaces. This raises theoretical questions about how time is embedded in space and what time and space mean to migrants. This paper argues that the core of the debates is grounded in the ways migrants experience subjectivities in defining what their mobilities mean to them. This argument is presented through a literature analysis of key research on the interrelated issues of temporality and spatiality, roots and routes, as well as assimilation and dissimilation that partly contribute to the meanings of mobilities. It offers an overview of current research on transnationalism and advances the current debates on temporality and spatiality. In this paper, temporality and spatiality in migration are conceptualized as dynamic and intertwined entities, rather than fixed or linear processes. This conceptualization is hoped to clarify the ways in which researchers often become divergent in their research strands, leaving gaps in understandings of current migration schemes.