The COVID-19 pandemic and the shutdown of schools created disruptions in Vietnamese education, which has not been evaluated to date. This paper reviews the effect of COVID-19 policies on teaching and learning in higher education in Vietnam. We first contextualize higher education in Vietnam before the COVID-19 pandemic. We then analyze the Vietnamese government's policies to curb the virus spread. In doing so, we highlight on Vietnam's inequalities of access to higher education, quality of curriculum and instruction, and institutional autonomy. Our analysis focuses on how Vietnam's COVID-19 policies simultaneously responded to the pandemic and moderate prior educational issues. This review contrasts the advantages and disadvantages of the policies and highlights the challenges Vietnamese universities face in policy implementation. We conclude this paper by discussing the implications of changes made during the pandemic to comment on higher education in Vietnam post-COVID-19.