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Applicants to police and military colleges have surged this year, with the number of female candidates more than doubling, as graduates are ensured a job upon graduation amid Vietnam's attempts to lure young talents into its armed forces.

“My son is busy with schoolwork so I am here to complete the formalities for him,” Le Hai Nam, 55, told Tuoi Tre last week at a district military command in Ho Chi Minh City.

Nam was there to make some modifications to the applications to a tank and armored vehicle school and a communication officer junior college for his child, a 12^th-grader at a high school in the city’s District 12.

“I wanted him to apply for IT or environmental science but he preferred army schools,” the father revealed.

Kieu Hung, another parent, is the opposite of Nam; it was him who had encouraged his son to join an army school.

“He had intended to go to an oil college,” Hung said.

Job security is the reason for these people’s choices, according to Major Nguyen Manh Cuong, a vice chief of admissions at the Ministry of Public Security.

“Unemployment is a social issue right now but both parents and students feel assured when they look at police and military schools,” Cuong said. “Students will be given a job, depending on the demand of our units, when they finish their studies.”

Senior Lieutenant Colonel Tran Dinh Choi, of the military command in the central province of Binh Dinh, added that another reason for this trend may be the incentives enrollees will be given during their time at police and military schools.

It could also be the Ministry of Defense’s policy to attract young people to armed forces schools in an attempt to build a stronger and more advanced army, he said.

Candidates seem eager to grasp this opportunity, Major Cuong said, adding that many provinces and cities have witnessed an expansion in the number of applicants to police colleges.   

Binh Dinh police said that their schools have received nearly 1,000 applications so far this year, compared to a mere 300-400 applicants last year.

Police in the Central Highlands province of Dak Lak also reported an upsurge in applicant numbers, with 3,400 applications having been submitted by now compared to 2,000 in the entire year of 2012.

Submissions to police schools in the central city of Da Nang have risen 30 percent to 660 in the year to date, according to Dang Cong Toi, vice personnel chief at Da Nang City’s Police Department.

More applications are being sent in, Toi said.

Over 1,000 female students out of the total 3,000 have submitted applications to police schools in Hanoi this year while that number was merely 400 last year, according to Nguyen Quang Duc, with the personnel office of the Hanoi Police Department.

Meanwhile, the Ministry of Defense said that they had issued an extra 10,000 application forms in response to an increase in the number of applicants to military schools.

Around 600 applications have been sent to the military command in the central province of Binh Dinh up to now, said Senior Lieutenant Colonel Tran Dinh Choi, a chief officer. 

This number is 1.5 times higher than that of 2012 and almost double the applicants in the previous two years, Choi added.

Candidates also show a strong interest in army schools in the Mekong Delta, where a year-on-year increase has also been recorded.