City suffers shortage of university places

Time Out 31 August 2013

More than 13,000 students who qualified for a university place in Hong Kong this summer have been denied a spot due to space shortages, writes Samuel Lai for Time Out.

Since 1994, the number of publicly funded degree places has been frozen at a maximum of 15,000. This translates to space for a mere 18% of the city’s teenagers to study at a government-funded institution – the lowest admission rate out of Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan and Singapore.

Experts fear that Hong Kong’s low university acceptance rate could cause the city to lose its competitive edge. Some are also concerned that the lack of publicly funded university places could add to inequality and inter-generational poverty, hindering social upward mobility in a city in which Hong Kong’s richest teenagers have 3.7 times more chance of enrolling in a university than the poorest, according to a study conducted earlier this year by the Hong Kong Institute of Education.
Full report on the Time Out site

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