Hong Kong has been overwhelmed by American cultural icons, from Starbucks and the iPhone to sending children to top universities in the United States, such as Harvard, Yale and MIT. But at least one aspect of US culture has made little impact here: its many top-notch liberal arts universities, which are often called colleges.
It was only recently, when the Catholic Church's Jesuit order unveiled a plan to build a liberal arts university in Hong Kong, that the US teaching model began to spark the curiosity of parents and students.
Liberal arts colleges focus on teaching undergraduates, rather than conducting expensive research and training graduate students in professional specialities.
While the humanities enjoy pride of place in their curriculums, many of these colleges also have distinguished faculties in science and engineering. The focus on undergraduates means students develop much closer relationships with their professors rather than spending all their time with teaching assistants - as is often the case at large, prestigious universities.
Century-old liberal arts colleges such as Amherst, Swarthmore and Williams focus on undergraduate teaching in small classrooms. St John's College, which has campuses in Annapolis, Maryland, and Santa Fe, New Mexico, teaches the entire Western canon - from ancient Greek mathematics to the music of Bach - that underpins Western civilisation.
Their strong emphasis on liberal arts leads to students developing their general knowledge and intellectual and reasoning capabilities, rather than preparing them for a specific career or trade. Many of their graduates, however, go on to top graduate schools, and the best law and medical schools in the country.
An American Jesuit, Reverend Michael McFarland, is the temporary head of the proposed Hong Kong university. On a visit to the city this month, he said a liberal arts institution in Hong Kong would train 'leaders with innovative ideas' comparable to the late Apple chief Steve Jobs and former US president Bill Clinton, rather than the technocrats who emerge from traditional classroom training. McFarland is a computer scientist and president of the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.
