For a number of years there has been much news in the media about the education crisis and the backwardness of scientific research in Vietnam. This situation was evident from the extremely modest position of Vietnamese universities in the World Universities Rankings and through the paucity of scientific articles published by Vietnamese scientists in international journals. Yet the country has the largest number of professors and doctors in Southeast Asia. In the educational sciences, the situation is even more disappointing. Once again, we have to pay careful attention to the quality of scientific staff in our country in order to find radical solutions to treat the causes of this crisis and backwardness. In this paper, the results of a preliminary examination of over 600 titles of masters’ dissertations in educational sciences are reported to identify the causes of weakness in educational research in Vietnam, and to suggest some fundamental solutions.