Up to and including the latest Policy Address, there have been many recent news items concerning Hong Kong’s universities and tertiary education in general. These covered funding, diversity, student numbers, and quotas for nonlocal students. These are all separate issues worthy of attention, but they are also interrelated issues that cause anxiety, debate, and even complacency.
Hong Kong’s universities are magnets for global interest, beacons of education and research excellence, and totemic representatives of the city’s soft power and influence. They have also been targets for budget cuts, generators of controversy, and corrosive jealousies. Was it ever thus? At least the recent Hong Kong Special Administrative Region education chief’s announcement that the government will not ask universities to return any further funding in the future is encouraging, following the unprecedented clawback of HK$4 billion ($514.8 million). Let us hope that any damage done is short-lived. I did not see anything similar affecting top Chinese mainland universities, even though they could be argued to face similar budget issues.
However, I agree that all universities need to be accountable and transparent with all funding. This is why the recent Policy Address, with a focus on internationalization and raising the cap on self-financing nonlocal students to 50 percent of local-student admissions, is so important. It recognizes that attracting top international talent in the student body and the staff members that teach them is essential.
I keep track of Hong Kong’s universities across various forums, and I am always emphasizing that we have five in the QS ranking’s global top 100. This level of elite representation is a unique feature for any city anywhere in the world. This “mantra” is now being regularly reiterated by others. My own university, the University of Hong Kong (HKU), is now knocking on the door of top-10 status. One may question why HKU is so highly ranked, but the answer lies not so much in reputation as in how that reputation is built. The bedrock for HKU and all other top universities of Hong Kong is high-impact research and the attendant top-level publications, the regular leading of grant awards, the hosting of many elite scholars, and the rigorous teaching and courses. It is also dependent on the internationalization of both the student and academic bodies.
There is strength in the diversity of our students, our academics, our universities, and our offerings, and hopefully room for all bright and curious students who want to learn
I am a strong supporter of true internationalization, having personally benefited from it. Hence, it is encouraging to see strong emphasis on this in the Policy Address. There is real intent to attract more international staff and students with HK$40 million in funding to the University Grants Committee to help facilitate this through overseas and mainland recruitment initiatives. Concerns have been raised about the increasing number of mainland students supplanting locals, as well as the number of truly international students from elsewhere. This is coupled with perhaps justifiable claims of abuse of the HKSAR’s aggressive talent-attraction programs. It is all about an appropriate balance and proper checks. I welcome the excellent quality of students from the mainland and around the world who come to the city’s top universities. This is given that more attention has come to Hong Kong as the welcome mat for international students to top US schools has been ripped up. Their loss can be our gain, with over 1,300 inquiries and 80 HKSAR elite university offers recently made to such students.
As a raw fact, in the 2024-25 academic year, of the 17,161 nonlocal students at Hong Kong’s public universities, 72 percent were from the mainland. I’d personally like to see more students from Europe, Australia, Africa, the United States, the United Kingdom, India, Southeast Asia, and South America walking around our campuses. Such richness in culture, outlook, language and opinions, forged across very different environments, can create a valuable student melting pot. This will facilitate debate, better understanding and appreciation of differences, and expose students from a more monocultural background to a realization that there are different ways of thinking, varied approaches to solutions, and that there is real strength and enrichment in true diversity of origin and culture. This is all while simultaneously building inter-nation personal level trust and lifelong friendships among future global leaders. A very valuable commodity for world harmony and international understanding!
And talking of origins, this is an important, if challenging, topic to raise that often slips under the radar. There is a significant cohort of international passport-holders among the academic staff here who are counted as Canadians, Americans, Australians, Europeans, and more, and who were born and raised on the mainland. Indeed, this very feature has recently led to a reverse brain drain, in which high-value ethnic-Chinese scientists and academics are being lured back to China as the American dream sours. Again, their loss is very much our gain, including for Hong Kong. I hope to see increased levels of international scholars of excellence and prestige, as the Policy Address intends.
Finally, we must not forget our many other universities. We have 11 across our city, with eight publicly funded. These include Hong Kong Baptist University, a great university at an excellent 250 global ranking in both QS and THE rankings, and the Metropolitan University, at 541 in the 2025 QS rankings. The other four institutions are Lingnan University, the Education University, Hang Seng University, Hong Kong Shue Yan University, several colleges, and the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts. Unsurprisingly, our elite universities grab most of the attention and headlines. Still, all these institutions of higher learning have a valuable role to play in education, including accepting students who, while deserving of the chance for a university education, have not performed as well as some others in our ultracompetitive market. Many of these have their own areas of absolute excellence, too.
There is strength in the diversity of our students, our academics, our universities, and our offerings, and hopefully room for all bright and curious students who want to learn.
The author is director of the Laboratory for Space Research at the University of Hong Kong.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.
