Cap on non-local undergrads raised to 50% of student body

Hong Kong will again raise the proportion of non-local students permitted to study at its publicly funded universities – this time to 50% of the student body – according to an announcement made just one year after the city doubled its quota of international students from 20% to 40%.

The announcement to raise the cap on non-local undergraduate enrolment with effect from the 2026 to 2027 academic year came in a policy address by Hong Kong’s Chief Executive John Lee on 17 September, as part of his vision, first mooted in 2024, to turn Hong Kong into a higher education hub.

He also announced policies to promote Hong Kong as a hub for innovation and technology and to strengthen industry-university research collaboration.

Lee said that universities can also raise the number of self-financing places in funded postgraduate research programmes, increasing the ceiling from 100% of existing places to 120%.

“Universities in Hong Kong are highly popular, with a double-digit year-on-year increase in the number of self-financing non-local applicants,” Lee said, explaining the increase in the undergraduate cap. He added that 72% of non-local undergraduate students are mainland Chinese.

Hong Kong’s highly ranked universities are a major draw for mainland students and cheaper than universities in the United States and the United Kingdom.

“After increasing the ratio from 20% to 40%, the academic standards of admitted students continued to rise rather than decline. A further increase to 50% is acceptable,” lawmaker Lau Chi Pang, who is also a special adviser to the president of Lingnan University, told local media just days before the announcement. He suggested further increases in the cap were possible in the future.

Record applications

Hong Kong’s Secterary for Education Christine Choi said earlier this month the city’s eight publicly funded universities had the capacity to enrol more students. According to Choi, some universities had already reached the 40% threshold set for the 2024 to 2025 academic year.

Hong Kong University (HKU), Hong Kong’s highest-ranked university, said it received a record 25,000 non-local applications for undergraduate programmes for the academic year beginning this month, 17 times more applications than available places. They include applications from students impacted by shifts in US education policies.

“For universities, increasing the number of higher fee-paying students means more income at a time when the government has reduced the amounts universities are allowed to hold in reserves,” an academic at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) told University World News.

However, some parent groups have criticised the raising of the undergraduate cap, saying it could affect the quality of teaching if the student-lecturer ratio worsens as a result.

Xiang Zhang, vice-chancellor of the HKU, said key measures announced in the policy address, including raising the non-local student ratio and promotion of Hong Kong as an education hub, would further attract global talent.

Nancy Ip, president of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, while not commenting directly on the non-local cap, welcomed the focus on research and innovation in Lee’s speech. “Amid increasingly intense global competition for talent, Hong Kong must continue to enhance its academic environment and research resources to strengthen its distinctive edge,” she said in a statement.

Dennis Lo Yuk-ming, vice-chancellor of CUHK, said in a statement the increases in non-local students at the undergraduate level and self-financing places at the postgraduate research level “will help attract more outstanding students to pursue their studies in Hong Kong”.

Accommodation shortage

But Simon Ho, president of Hong Kong’s private Hang Seng University, was quoted by local RTHK radio as saying the plan to raise the cap was “too drastic” and advocated a more gradual approach that took into account the student intake capacity of each institution, along with improvements to support measures.

He said “societal impacts” should also be considered before the change is implemented.

Universities are struggling to provide adequate accommodation for students at reasonable prices in the high-cost, densely packed city.

Lee last year gave the go-ahead for commercial buildings, including hotels, to be converted into student accommodation, with several universities recently acquiring properties under this scheme.

Lee announced on Wednesday 17 September that the government will “earmark new sites, including commercial ones” to construct university hostels to increase supply.

Kathy Lee, head of research at Colliers Hong Kong, a property firm which has held consultations with the government on land use to promote Hong Kong as an education hub, told University World News the announcement was a major step forward, given Hong Kong’s strict zoning and land controls.

“They’re expanding the scheme, allowing student accommodation projects to come from redevelopment and new development on commercial land in Hong Kong,” she said, noting the new rules would allow commercial companies to respond swiftly.

“It is the first time we are seeing this in Hong Kong,” she said. “Although the government [are] not saying they are going to provide land for commercial purpose-built student accommodation, they are allowing office buildings currently under construction or planning to change their use to student accommodation.”

“Previously in Hong Kong’s land-use or development scheme, there was no such thing as student accommodation, [which] they count as an ancillary facility of the university, and provided funding to the university to provide their own facilities.”

In a report titled Building Hong Kong into an International Education Hub released on 11 September, Colliers Hong Kong estimated the shortfall in purpose-built student accommodation at approximately 94,000 in the ongoing 2024 to 2025 academic year and projected that the gap would widen significantly to a shortfall of around 120,000 beds by 2028.

“These were conservative estimates,” Kathy Lee acknowledged, with projections to 2028 based on local student enrolments staying at current levels and non-local enrolment growth at 10% per year from 2024 onwards.

“Actually, the growth [from] 2024 to 2025 was 24%,” she said. “Now, with the government increasing the [non-local] cap from 40% to 50%, growth in demand will be much greater than we projected.

“The [Hong Kong] government is adopting new ideas quite quickly and is pushing out the student accommodation scheme as fast as they can because they see the market potential, especially with the geopolitical situation.”

She pointed to US visa policies and statements on restricting student visas for mainland Chinese, so the government “sees that there’s a huge opportunity for Hong Kong to replace or at least become the preferred location for those students”.

Definition of non-local

There has been some disquiet from Hong Kong parents about rising “competition” from the mainland for places at Hong Kong’s universities, and particularly from children of parents who entered Hong Kong via the city’s Top Talent scheme for graduates of top overseas universities.

Around 95% of people who come to Hong Kong on the talent scheme are from the mainland.

Some Hong Kong concern groups have lobbied the government, saying the talent scheme was abused by parents who did not necessarily want to work in Hong Kong but wanted their children to qualify for the local student quota at Hong Kong’s universities, which also qualified them for cheaper fees for locals set at around HK$44,500 (US$5,700) compared to three times as much for international students.

After an outcry earlier this year, Hong Kong’s Education Bureau announced in late July that children of non-locals will be required to have been resident in Hong Kong for a minimum of two years before they become eligible to enrol as local students.

The new requirement will take effect from the 2027 to 2028 academic year, with a transitional period in the first year requiring only one year of residency to be eligible.

Schools offering HK qualifications

The number of schools and private tutoring companies in mainland China offering the Hong Kong school-leaving exam known as the Diploma of Secondary Education, or DSE, has mushroomed in the past two years as a way to secure admission to Hong Kong institutions.

In his policy address on Wednesday, John Lee announced the government would work to widen global recognition of the DSE while stressing that “measures will be taken to crack down on unauthorised provision” at so-called “shell schools”, or unauthorised, unregulated schools that work with agencies to help non-locals become eligible for subsidised university places.

A private Hong Kong secondary school recently had its registration revoked by the authorities for allegedly offering “Hong Kong student status” to students who had never studied in Hong Kong, allowing them to take the DSE exam in the mainland city of Shenzhen across the border from Hong Kong.

Other schools have reportedly offered DSE courses for students as far away as Beijing.

The DSE has been reformed in recent years, including the scrapping of “Listening and Comprehensive Skills” and “Speaking Skills” papers in Cantonese – the Chinese dialect in use in Hong Kong – making it easier for non-Cantonese speakers on the mainland, who speak Mandarin, to pass the exam.