A recent major influx of international students to Hong Kong – mostly from mainland China – has led to new policies to house them, reversing previous policy that restricted non-local student numbers due to the densely populated city’s chronic housing and land shortages.

Hong Kong’s universities are also expanding academic departments and setting up new centres of research to align with Beijing’s research policies, with universities recently allowed to acquire and repurpose commercial buildings in Hong Kong to facilitate this.

Hong Kong is seeing some success in its drive to attract more international academics to teach at the city’s top universities. It comes after a sustained exodus, spanning pandemic and post-pandemic years, of both local students and academics.

Accommodating incoming students has become a “number one topic” at education conferences in Hong Kong, according to Ryan Allen, associate professor of international education at Soka University in the United States, who runs the College Towns newsletter on urbanism and higher education.

“It is all about how to accommodate international students, but when they say ‘international students’ they mean Chinese that are coming over [from the mainland], and so many of these are coming for university,” he told University World News after a recent visit to Hong Kong.

While accommodation challenges are common in other countries – notably Canada and Australia, which have used student accommodation shortages as a reason to restrict numbers of international students – Allen noted that “in Hong Kong there is just so little space, especially around the universities, for new construction”.

“It's not that simple for a university, especially in a place that is, per square foot, the most expensive real estate on the planet.”

Swift rise in student numbers

The rise in numbers of students has been swift, mainly over the past year, but the number of academics and researchers is also rising.

Hong Kong Education Secretary Christine Choi Yuk-lin said in April that “world-renowned professors from US institutions are relocating to Hong Kong”, adding they were driven by tighter visa policies and geopolitical tensions affecting traditional Western study destinations.

Choi recently revealed that applications from non-local students had increased significantly this year, with the numbers almost doubling in some publicly funded institutions. The expansion is part of a government policy unveiled last year to make Hong Kong an international higher education hub.

Notably, the Education University of Hong Kong (EduHK) will increase its intake from 2,700 to 5,000 in the coming academic year, which begins this month, September.

Mainland Chinese students accounted for 74% of non-local first-year students in the 2024/2025 academic year after the cap on non-locals was raised from 20% of the undergraduate student body to 40% from September 2024 for both publicly funded and private universities, sparking considerable expansion in private university admissions as well.

According to the education department’s figures, some 8,000 mainland Chinese students were approved to study in Hong Kong in the first quarter of 2025, compared to 3,000 over the same period last year.

In July, the University of Hong Kong (HKU) reported a historic high of over 25,000 non-local applications for undergraduate programmes in the coming academic year – 17 times more than available places – including more than 20 international students impacted by sudden shifts in US higher education policies. Of these, 21,000 were from mainland China.

The influx has caused prices for rental accommodation to rise by as much as 12% in neighbourhoods near universities, according to Centaline, a major chain of estate agents in the city.

The big rise in Hong Kong students tends to be seen in higher-ranked universities in Hong Kong such as HKU, noted Martin Wong, provost of Hong Kong’s Baptist University (HKBU), a smaller liberal arts college. “But I would say there is some trickle down, so every [university] in Hong Kong will get more [students].”

He told University World News mainland student demand at HKBU was particularly high for masters programmes which are not subject to the non-local cap.

There is “a lot of room to expand – it can bring in a lot of resources, and demand is high. For example, in Chinese medicine, we are only admitting 15% of applicants. In computer science it is 10%, so there is a lot of room to admit more students.”

However, he acknowledged that the shortage of student housing was a constraint.

Converting commercial buildings

In the past, universities were restricted in their increase of non-local student numbers due to the lack of space to expand student dormitories and the very high price of accommodation in Hong Kong’s private rental market.

But in a change of policy, Hong Kong Chief Executive John Lee last year announced the “Study in Hong Kong” campaign to attract more overseas students, especially those from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and other Belt and Road countries.

At the same time, he announced the city would increase the supply of student hostels, introducing a pilot scheme to allow the conversion of hotels or commercial buildings into student hostels “on a self-financing and privately funded basis”.

Universities have been acquiring assets at attractive prices as commercial prices have dropped amid a tourism slump in the city.

“It seems the government really wants to attract students to come [to Hong Kong], and they have to settle them, so this is the fastest way to get housing,” said Michelle Cheng Wing Tung, assistant professor at EduHK, who has conducted research on student housing in the city.

She told University World News: “Around 2017-2018 the Hong Kong government spent a lot of money on expanding university housing, but those hostels are still being built, and the target for building all of them is 2027, so it’s a few years from getting all of them done.”

She was referring to the government’s plan for an extra 13,470 student hostel places, currently being implemented. But Cheng noted that these plans were targeted towards housing undergraduate students.

“Even if they would have [already] been built, they would not be sufficient for the self-financed masters’ students that universities are currently drawing in. So they would still need new spaces.”

Growth is likely to continue apace. In early August Choi said the non-local student quota was still not fully reached and that some institutions were not yet ready to increase their intake in terms of staffing and facilities.

Choi told broadcast media on 3 August that the number of non-local students at public universities in 2024-25 accounted for about 23% of student places, still short of the 40% cap.

Hotel conversions

Cheng said university-endorsed housing was important for international students unfamiliar with the city’s expensive housing market.

One approach is to buy a hotel – Hong Kong’s hospitality sector is in the doldrums due to a big drop-off in inbound visitors to Hong Kong after the pandemic – to convert into a student hostel operated by the university, she said.

Another approach adopted by most Hong Kong universities is to work with property owners, as “university endorsed housing”.

HKU is working with nearby hotels and is in the process of finalising agreements to ensure all first-year non-local undergraduates are provided with student accommodation, Bennett Yim, HKU’s director of undergraduate admissions and international student exchanges, told local media. Yim added HKU would consider cooperating with private developers to build student hostels.

“The government’s [non-local] quota expansion has been a crucial factor. Previously, many students hesitated to apply, thinking admission chances were slim due to limited spots,” he was quoted as saying.

There are also commercial initiatives. Centaline is converting 10 two- to three-star hotels to provide 3,000 beds in the next three years, the estate agency said.

But Cheng warned such commercial conversions may seek to maximise occupancy through subdivided units, sacrificing communal spaces and reducing them to “just a place to sleep” rather than environments supporting student wellbeing and development.

Space for expansion

Some university campuses in outer areas are looking to set up satellite centres for part-time students and those enrolled in external programmes. Estate agents said this has become possible with Hong Kong office property prices and retail property falling 43% and 35%, respectively, since mid-2019.

The School of Business and Management at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, situated in the scenic outskirts, recently agreed to a purchase in the central commercial area of Admiralty – one of Hong Kong’s most expensive commercial districts. The site, previously occupied by a large and popular restaurant, will be used for teaching.

City University of Hong Kong acquired part of a shopping centre in another upmarket commercial district — Tsim Sha Tsui.

Lingnan University reportedly paid HK$120 million (US$15.3 million) this year to purchase a shopping arcade, ground floor shops and a car park of the residential tower close to its current campus to convert into classrooms, agents said.

Looking across the border

Some universities have more space across the border in China, which could be utilised. For example, the Shenzhen campus of the Chinese University of Hong Kong is now larger than its Hong Kong campus.

HKBU’s Wong pointed to HKBU’s campus across the border in Zhuhai, about two hours from Hong Kong, operated jointly with Beijing Normal University, whose mainland students receive a joint China and Hong Kong degree. “The campus is 10 times larger than here [in Hong Kong],” he noted.

“The campus here is very crowded. We need to look into models that enable the two campuses to work closely together so that we can take full advantage of the space over there [in China].

“When we come to expanding our research programme, we could have labs there, and that would work to integrate the two sides together closely,” he said.