Keeping HKU international is key to the city's future

A new term has started at University of Hong Kong, with a double intake composed of three-year and four-year degree students. Our campus is crowded, with about 3,000 more students than usual. Fortunately, with the addition of the new Centennial Campus, students are more spread out among some exceptionally good facilities.

I have already given my first lecture on population and sustainable development in Hong Kong. This is one of the courses in the new curriculum that is designed to get students to think about critical issues, so HKU graduates will continue to be fit for the 21st-century workplace.

Interestingly, about 30 per cent of my class is made up of non-JUPAS (Joint University Programmes Admissions System) and non-local students. I was told that there were about 18,000 applications to HKU from outside Hong Kong this year. Few universities have that number of applications in total, particularly when we can add to that many more thousands of non-JUPAS applicants from within Hong Kong.

We hear much about the "mainlandisation" of non-local students in tertiary institutions, and I wondered whether this was the case at HKU. HKU tries to strike a balance by setting a 50:50 breakdown of mainland non-locals to overseas non-locals in our full-time undergraduate intake.

HKU has had applications for undergraduate study from 117 nationalities in recent years, so, as a university, it is clearly developing an excellent international reputation.

These students have to meet our high academic admission standards, as well as come within the limits imposed on us by the University Grants Committee - for overseas applications, we typically admit only one out of every 10.