tim's experiment

Sometimes you read something in the newspapers which leaves you wondering where reporters have been for the last ten years. Good example in the Post last week: lead story on front of City section, 62 pt all caps headline, and what were they announcing? That most of the nominally  “international” people at Hong Kong universities are actually from the mainland. No shit, Sherlock! This is not news to anyone who has been around local universities recently. Indeed as several local universities have large and prosperous jounalism teaching departments it is likely that the only reason this has not been reported before is that it seems so obvious. Next week’s shock revelation: most Hong Kong students are between the ages of 18 and 21. The flexible use of the term “international’ may be news in Hong Kong but it has already reached London. The people who compile the Financial Times league tables, in which many local institutions are proud to feature, have announced that “international” will in future exclude people who hold a passport of the country in which their university sits. I don’t know who that is aimed at but forthcoming editions of the league tables will be perused with unusual interest round here.

Actually there are two things which call for some explanation here. One is why are local universities are not too keen on “real” foreigners. The other is why they collect so many mainlanders.

Now I’m not sure about the foreigners. Clearly for some people the language is a problem. All the local universities — even Chinese U — officially use English. But many people come up with ingenious reasons why particular subjects need to be taught in Chinese. And of course if all the students in the class speak Cantonese then the proceedings naturally become a bit bilingual. These comfortable arrangements are disrupted if a foreigner appears. And some foreigners in the past were made to feel quite unwelcome. On the other hand mainland students present the same problem, because many of them do not speak Cantonese. English survives as the compromise between the mainlanders, who do not wish to be taught in Cantonese, and the locals, who do not wish to be taught in PTH.  The advantage of the mainlanders, from this point of view, is that they are unlikely to make a critical assessment of the teacher’s own English. Many local academics suspect that they don’t speak English too good, and some of them are right. Probably there is also a marketing problem. Hong Kong universities have little interest in recruiting students from Third World countries which are short of university places. They want outstanding students from respectable countries, who could go to Oxford or Harvard. And of course such people tend to get offers from Oxford or Harvard, and accept them.

The attraction of mainlanders is simple. Mainlanders mean money. Some years ago the University Grants people decided that what they really wanted was two research universities and six teaching ones. This plan might have been explicitly imposed on everyone, but for the difficulty of deciding between  the three possible research establishments which one should be reduced to the teaching ranks. So instead we have been subjected to a variety of financial wheezes designed to ensure that money is showered on the threesome with potential, at the expense of the designated also-rans. This led, for those in the less prestigeous parts of the tertiary sector, to predictions that there would be a shortage of money. In fact I remember a seminar at which we were presented with the End of the World on Powerpoint, complete with spread sheets and projections prepared by the Finance Office, indicating that in about three years time the sackings would start because there would be No Money.

This was presented at the time as a way of getting universities to raise funds more vigorously. But there is a limit to the number of millionaires willing to shovel money to get their names on a building. And in any case the people who were likely to be affected by the upcoming Armaggedon were not in the university fund-raising departments, they were in teaching units. So of course they set to selling what they had to sell. And there was a great proliferation of courses planned to be “self-financed”, which is what we call profit-making in academic circles. You do not get higher standards of honesty in universities, just a better class of euphemism. Over the years I have observed a continuing increase in the number of people allowed to dip their bread in the resulting pool of money, and the amounts they manage to extract from it. As a result the difference between the actual cost of putting on a course and the amount charged to students (what in more coarse circles they would call the gross profit) has ballooned. As a rough rule about half of what the student pays is now in this category. Courses have of course as a result got steadily more expensive. Indeed departments wishing to offer cheap courses are vigorously discouraged from doing so.

This suggests to economic theorists and cynics that we have here discovered a large group of consumers who are not bothered by price and may even find a high price more attractive. And we have. The group in question is mainland parents. Many mainland parents now have plenty of money to spend on their single permitted kid. Hong Kong, even when charging like a wounded bull, is cheaper and easier to reach than famous competitors in the US or Europe. And your kid can come home for the holidays.

There are other reasons. If you are considering from a purely practical point of view how to put bums on university seats, the mainland is the market to go for. It’s not only big, and close. It’s also unified. Go to four or five educational fairs, visit half a dozen front rank cities, haunt a few websites, and you can put yourself on the map for millions of potential consumers. It helps that a lot of mainland universities are not very good, and in some subjects they are all not very good for political reasons. Their student accommodation is primitive and overcrowded even by Hong Kong standards and their teaching rather old-fashioned. Also Hong Kong itself is a big attraction for mainland students. They can do what they like, say what they like, travel overseas as much as they can afford, read books which are not found in mainland libraries and surf the parts of the internet which Big Brother does not like.

In short, from a purely business point of view, the mainland market represents the low-hanging fruit. Getting students from other places is more troublesome, more expensive, more fiddly.  I hope we shall now see universities willing to take the trouble. The advantages of having a reasonable number of “real” international students are obvious and important. On the other hand it seems unfair to blame people for responding to the situation in whch they find themselves and the incentives unwittingly provided. In academic administration, just as in the public one, ingenious initiatives often have unintended consequences.