Top Chinese Students flock to study in Hong Kong

[Ian_Lee]

It used to be Beida and Qinghua are the first choices of all students in Mainland.

But not again this year. This year the top three universities in HK -- HKU, HKCU, HKUST -- also openly recruit students in Mainland.

And the result is amazing. Many students who are accepted both by Beida/Qinghua and HKU/HKCU/HKUST prefer the latter.

There are 4,884 applicants (Many of them are the top-900 scoring students in the national college entrance examination in that city or province) competing to enter into HKU. Only 250 are accepted.

Moreover, 11 of those top 900-score students, who are usually embraced by any universities in Mainland, including Beida and Qinghua, are rejected by HKU.

The students accepted by these three HK universities have a higher score in average than those Beida and Qinghua take in this year.

Some other HK universities also try to attract top students from Mainland to enroll via financial incentive. The City University of Hong Kong provides HK$400,000 (US$53,000) scholarship to eligible applicants.

[atitarev]

Thanks for the post Ian_Lee, only I think to study/practice Putonghua - Hong Kong is not the best place, especially if you choose to concentrate on simplified characters. Am I right?

Beida is very popular just for that - a place to learn Putonghua.

[yorkie_bear]

hallo

i wonder how surprising this is... my guess is that studying in HK will

- give them an opportunity to live & study in fairly westernised environment without having to go to Oz, UK, US etc.

- with this experience and with the mandarin and their obvious intellect, they'll be prime candidates for top positions in HK where salary I am guessing would be much higher than the mainland. I mean all HK firms now are gung ho about China.

- if they relocate back to the mainland I reckon they'll be able to command a higher salary too.

[gato]

Anatoli, your question is just a bit off-topic

So what's the eligibility for the scholarship. I think the HK universities would be too expensive except for the richest 0.00001% of Chinese students.

[wushijiao]

This sounds like great news. But I wonder if any native Hong Kongers have complained about the Mainlanders "stealing" their spots, or something like that?

[Ian_Lee]

Gato:

According to the figure released by HKU, about 38% of the applicants got scholarship. This is a pretty high ratio as compared with US/Europe universities for undergraduate applicants.

And most of these students who do not receive scholarship pay the tuition out of their own pockets. It looks like there are some parents who are very well-off in Mainland. But many Chinese parents (as compared with American parents who usually ask their kids to get a government loan for college) sacrifice by lending/working two jobs/pooling relatives' money to send their kids for the best education they can get.

And this is just the beginning of the trend.

Those HK universities, which have lately been endowed with generous contributions form the tycoons, can provide a lucrative offer to the brightest students in Mainland who find the deal too good to reject.

[gato]

Qinghua reports that 1/5 of its student are considered "poor" enough for financial aid, but that is "poor" as measured mainland standards. I don't have the exact number, but I'd imagine that the poverty line is probably something like a family income of 6000 yuan per year.

http://news.tsinghua.edu.cn/new/news.php?id=10980

2004-2005学年度，我校共有3210名贫困家庭学生，占全校本科生13221人的24.3%。学校每年用于本科生和研究生经济资助的资金超过两千万。

[Ian_Lee]

One and half year has passed and the fever is getting hotter.

Now many mainland media and scholars downgrade Beida and Tsinghua as 二流大学 (second grade university) as compared with HKU, HKCU and HKUST:

http://virgocollins.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!D6BF7814A66637B4!524.entry

[Xiao Kui]

So which mainland students mainly go there, from Guangdong? Aren't the classes in Cantonese? Just curious.

[gato]

Most classes at HKU are taught in English, I believe.

Its history faculty is almost entirely non-Chinese, for example:

http://www.hku.hk/history/staff.html

[Ian_Lee]

In 2006, fifteen 状元 (the highest score students in provincial or municipal national university entrance exams) that include those from Beijing municipality, Shandong, Sichuan, Guangdong, Hainan....etc shun Beida and/or Tsinghau and opt for universities in HK.

[Ian_Lee]

Moreover, the admission policy of Hong Kong's universities in Mainland gears towards the poor students in the impoverished provinces in central and southwestern China:

http://bbs.rednet.cn/1-2.dll?BoardID=81&ID=5288083

The rationale behind this policy is that unlike those well-off students in the East Coast, the HK universities consider those underprivileged students in those backward regions don't have that many options as the formers do.

It sounds like affirmative action in U.S.