tim's experiment

The local higher education industry is slowly preparing for four-year degrees in 2012. One of my colleagues attended a talkfest on the topic, and heard an interesting statistic. The impression most people have picked up is that under the new system all the people who would have gone to university for three years will instead go for four. But the official planners do not expect this to happen. They expect about a fifth of our students to go and study in the UK.

This is an unintended consequence of several groups of people doing their best. The new 3-3-4 arrangement requires a new qualification, to replace A Levels. It will be taken at the end of Form 6, instead of at the end of Forms 5 and 7 as the present examinations are. Clearly overseas countries who have their own Form 6 exam already can easily be persuaded to regard ours as equivalent to theirs, and in many cases this has been done.  The UK presents a problem because there is no Form 6 exam there. So basically ours can either be equivalent to the Form 5 one or equivalent to the Form 7 one. To the great satisfaction of the people in charge of this problem the UK has been persuaded to regard Hong Kong’s new diploma as equivalent to British A Levels.

Now we come to the unintended consequence. This means that a Hong Kong student who has completed Form 6 can hie himself off to the UK and complete an internationally recognised degree in three years.  From the parental point of view this is an interesting saving. Of course you have to pay for more travel but a year’s fees and subsistence could add up to a few airfares easily enough. And in the saved year the student might be earning some serious money.  Hence the guess, and in these matters a guess is all we can expect at this early stage, that 20 percent of the potential students will skip Hong Kong higher ed altogether and go to dear old Blighty. Well, I suppose it’s one way of dealing with all those complaints about falling English standards.