tim's experiment

Why, people wonder, do so many Hong Kong students elect to go to university in the UK? Is it a colonial hang-over, a misguided nostalgia for London as the mothership? Or is it due to a misguided aversion to the local tertiary facilities?

Not exactly. Part of the reason is cultural. Studying overseas have become a part of what you may call the standard middle class educational package. As a result many Hong Kong kids do it and anyone who refuses an affordable offer will fear that he or she is missing out.

Partly it is anthropological. Young people have always, at a certain age, felt the urge to establish their status as individuals outside the family. This led, in different periods, to desperate expedients like emigration to America, running away to sea, joining a passing circus or taking the Queen’s Shilling.

Nowadays it is reflected in an almost universal feature of university life in developed countries: students do not attend their home town university, however prestigious it may be. Brilliant students who live in Oxford go to Cambridge, and vice versa.

Unfortunately attempts to reproduce this bid for independence in Hong Kong are necessarily unconvincing. Our universities build residence blocks and try hard to create a social milieu called “hall life”. But this is all a bit artificial when the student can easily go home every weekend if she wishes to, and indeed in most cases can conveniently go home every night.

Then there is the matter of economics. Here we must take a brief detour through Hong Kong’s educational history. Soon after 1997 it was decided that Hong Kong universities should switch from three-year degrees to four-year degrees. But the government had no intention of treating everyone to an extra year of education. The extra year at university would simply replace the last year at school.

Accordingly the old school-leaving exam, commonly known as A Levels, was abolished, and replaced by a new thing, called the Diploma of Secondary Education, which was to be taken at the end of the sixth secondary year, instead of the seventh.

A problem then arose. If no students took A Levels then it appeared it would be very difficult for them to secure admission to UK universities, which had traditionally required this qualification.

This was a problem for Hong Kong, but it was also a problem for the UK universities, which make more money out of overseas students than they do from local ones, and value their extensive Hong Kong customer base.

The solution, which pleased everybody, was for the English universities to accept that the DSE was entirely equivalent to an English A Level (Scotland has a separate system) despite the fact that the student had spent a whole year less in obtaining it.

But this led to another oddity. English universities were still working what we may conveniently call the old Hong Kong system, under which students got their degrees after three years of study. And there was no question of them changing it.

So the way this adds up if you are a parent goes like this. if your student studies in Hong Kong then he or she will pay the local fees of HK$42,000. According to one of our local university websites living costs for a student living in hall (rather than at home) will come to about $80,000 a year. So for a degree someone is going to have to cough up $122,000 x 4, which is $488,000 or, in round figures, half a million bucks.

If the student goes to England the fees for an overseas visitor start at GBP10,000 a year, They go up to  much higher figures for some subjects. Living costs, according to the Times Higher Ed, are GBP9,000 a year. Which means you will pay GBP19,000 but this will be multiplied only by three, which gets us to GBP57,000, or at current rates HK$570,000.

So for the rather modest extra outlay of $70,000, plus some air fares, you save a year of your kid’s life and have something you can tell your friends about with pride.

From the point of view of the potential student this is good news for another reason. Having glued an extra year on the front of their courses Hong Kong universities decided that this should be spent on a sort of academic forced shopping labelled “general education”. The student is required to choose courses from a variety of different places and also subjected to some requirements, usually involving languages.

As UK universities only have three years with their students this sort of thing has never caught on there. For some students this is a shame. Some applicants to university have only the vaguest idea of what they want to do. When I was interviewing people who had applied to Baptist U I could see the list of courses they had applied for and was often stunned by the sheer variety. Applicants were apparently willing to leave their final choice from a wide range up to the joint efforts of the examiners and the JUPAS computer.

If, however, you are a student who has a very clear idea of what he wants to study at university than there is a lot to be said for a system in which a Physics degree consists entirely of Physics and a History degree consists entirely of History.

Well, Hong Kong universities have never been too bothered by what their students wanted. Places were in short supply so it was a seller’s market. Say what you like about UK universities, at least they try to please. They need the fees.

All this is a bit rough on local parents. If you are at the airport on certain evenings after Christmas you see a lot of parents trying not to shed visible tears until their offspring have safely disappeared down the Immigration channel and left them to return to their empty nests. But our universities are not too bothered what parents think either.