Hong Kong News Hub: Hub-happy Hong Kong: Do we want more non-local students?

The chief executive is reportedly going to propose doubling the proportion of “non-local” students which Hong Kong universities are allowed to admit to undergraduate courses.

This is intended, according to “sources”, to turn Hong Kong into a higher education hub. Another hub? Are we getting a bit hub-happy?

University students in the Chinese University of Hong Kong, on August, 31, 2023. Photo: Kyle Lam/HKFP. — University students at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, on August, 31, 2023. Photo: Kyle Lam/HKFP.

The move will raise the share of non-locals in the student body to 40 per cent, or from the current 15,000 to – presumably – something in the region of 30,000. To put it another way of the 15,000 University Grants Committee (UGC)-funded bachelor’s degree places available each year the number reserved for non-locals will increase from 3,000 to 6,000.

The announcement came with some painfully obvious efforts to spin it in a nice way. The admission of local students, the “sources” said, would not be affected because “non-locals enrol through non-JUPAS avenues”. This is nonsense. The way in which local students will be affected has nothing to do with the admissions system. They will be affected because 3,000 places which were previously available to them will be offered instead to other people.

Universities, said “sources” would be encouraged to recruit students from Southeast Asian countries and “regions participating in the Belt and Road initiative to avoid the non-local quota being monopolised by mainland students”.

one belt one road — Belt and Road Initiative. Photo: GovHK.

At the moment three quarters of the “non-locals” admitted are from the mainland.

This is likely to continue to be the case. Local universities now have lots of experience of recruiting students for “self-funded” (or as they say in the outside world, profit-making) post-graduate courses. The mainland market has many advantages.

The main one is that it is big. Advertise in a few publications, put up a decent web page, turn up at three or four “higher education fairs” in big cities, and you are contacting a very large number of potential customers.

Other markets are small, further away, have few people rich enough to contemplate sending their children to Hong Kong for four years – even if we are covering tuition – and need to be addressed in different local languages.

So mainlanders it will be. This is not a complaint. During my teaching years I encountered three waves of mainlanders and they were all generally nice kids in different ways.

Students at the University of Hong Kong. File photo: Kyle Lam/HKFP.

We started with a few carefully picked individuals on lavish scholarships. They were selected with great care and although some mainland academics said rather snootily that, of course, they wouldn’t send their very best students to Hong Kong, detecting academic promise in 17-year-olds is not an exact science and these students were excellent.

They were often the most successful student in their classes and went on to win prizes and scholarships.

The next wave was not selected. They were the offspring of parents who could afford it. They were a pleasant enough bunch but a lot of them seemed to have come to Hong Kong primarily for the shopping. The result was unexpected. My local students had been quite happy to see mainlanders hogging the academic limelight and seemed to regard them respectfully as interesting, but with a deficient sense of work-life balance.

The third wave was the intake to our local version of the taught master’s degree. They were an educated bunch obviously. A degree was a requirement. Many of them seemed to have been very lucky in their English examinations though.

Hong Kong Baptist University. Photo: GovHK.

One year I was lucky enough to have a Norwegian student who spoke fluent Putonghua and reported to me after the first class that the mainlanders had been horrified at how difficult my accent was. There is nothing wrong with my accent. I was a paid broadcaster for many years. I can only conclude that this is what happens if you ban the BBC.

Anyway, the fact that many of the new non-locals will be mainlanders is not the main problem. Clearly 3,000 places disappearing from JUPAS [Joint University Programmes Admissions System] would make it harder for locals to get places. If the places are not taken from the JUPAS system, then universities are going to have to cater for a larger population.

Two legislative members offered comforting thoughts. Chow Man-kong (education) who works at the Education University, thought the quota should go up to 50 per cent, adding that many lecture halls were big enough to accommodate a few more students. Prof Chow had not been reading the small print. If the quota goes up but the student population does not there is no need for larger lecture halls.

Lingnan Universality professor Lau Chi-pong said the influx would not hinder local students’ search for dormitories as “[t]hese non-locals would have to settle their accommodation before coming here and Hong Kong’s public transport system is well developed.” But he added incoherently “no matter how far the students live, the universities will have to take care of their accommodation.”

Clearly some people, possibly including the chief executive, have not sorted out the details yet. Will the increased quota require a decreased quota for locals? If not, will the universities be provided with more money? UGC courses are massively subsidised. Do we really want to spend oodles of money on educating other people’s children? Will the non-local students have priority for student dormitories, upon arrival or for the whole course?

Above all is there a market for this? Prof Chow suggested that the government should set up a centralised student recruiting agency, which suggests a certain lack of confidence. This would “target top students and those from the middle class”. An interesting notion. Does Prof Chow’s university, one wonders, prefer students from the middle class? And is that even legal?

The problem which nobody dares to mention, of course, is that the attractions of Hong Kong as a high education destination for mainlanders have wilted somewhat of late. Our universities used to able to offer subjects like history, politics and journalism in ways which simply could not be found in mainland universities. Nowadays, not so much. We still have business, I suppose. This will perhaps in due course be revised to make it palatable for patriots. Capitalism with Chinese characteristics?

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