I Called It a "University for Rich Kids." Then I Had to Teach There.

I Called It a "University for Rich Kids." Then I Had to Teach There.

Before VinUni existed and its tuition fees became the thing Vietnamese parents argued about, RMIT Vietnam held that title. "The university for rich kids." I had never set foot on its campus, never sat in on a class, never spoken to one of its professors. I just had an opinion, formed the way most opinions about places we've never touched are formed: from press coverage, rumor, and enough people repeating the same line that it stopped sounding like an opinion and started sounding like a fact.

On November 14, 2019, I started teaching there as a visiting lecturer. I did not walk in neutral.

I walked in as a business practitioner, not an academic — twenty-five years in oil and gas and business, standing in front of a room I'd already half-decided I understood. For a while, that was its own quiet discomfort. Not whether the students would respect me, but whether real-world experience alone would hold up in a room built to debate ideas rather than accept them because a guest speaker said so.

It held up. But only once I stopped treating the room as an audience and started treating it as a counterpart, the same way I would across a negotiating table.

What actually broke the prejudice down was not one class, and not one moment. It took the better part of five years, and there were stretches along the way where the "rich kids" label almost felt confirmed before it was disproven again. What I kept watching, semester after semester, was students — Vietnamese, German, Korean, Indian, Chinese, sitting in the same small room — presenting positions, getting challenged, and defending them with a level of composure I had, frankly, assumed would be missing from students I'd already pre-labeled as coasting on family money. It was a small class. It functioned like a working multinational team, a "United Nations" as I've come to call it, long before any of them had held a real job.

That is the part press coverage and rumor never captured, and the part I couldn't have known without standing in that room myself, five years running.

I am not writing this to make a point about anyone else's assumptions. I am writing it because it took me twenty-five years of telling other people to verify before they conclude, and I still managed to hold an unverified conclusion about a university for years, simply because I had never walked through its door.

The label was never really about RMIT. It was about how little contact I'd had with it. Five years in that classroom didn't just change my mind about a school. It gave me the only kind of proof that ever changes a prejudice: showing up.