Reflections: nurturing creative talent is key to Hong Kong's future

Much has been written about the onslaught of mainland visitors in Hong Kong: in shopping malls, MTR trains, kindergartens and primary schools, particularly those near the border. For years they have had a large presence at local universities.

Many of the mainland's brightest students have snapped up scholarships for undergraduate studies here.

In 2012-13, mainland students made up 1,615 of the 2,407 students admitted into publicly funded graduate programmes, Secretary for Education Eddie Ng Hak-kim said in a recent reply to questions from legislators.

Some 531 locals were admitted, the remainder being students from other places. Unlike self-funded master's programmes like MBAs, EMBAs, or in popular areas such as finance or marketing, the publicly funded Master of Philosophy (MPhil) and doctoral programmes are research-oriented, and aimed at nurturing innovators, researchers and thinkers.

There is no quota on people from outside Hong Kong doing research graduate degrees here; this is in line with international practice and intended to attract the best talent worldwide.

Attracting talented students to come and investigate worthy topics is no doubt of great value. Imposing a ceiling on foreign students will only undermine the quality or diversity of research carried out locally.

But a matter of concern is the low level of interest shown among local students for advanced studies. Only about 500 out of 15,000 university graduates pursued that path in 2012-13. It is not that we lack a culture of lifelong learning - the purpose of a major government drive in the early 2000s; indeed, far more students are doing part-time, professionally oriented master's degrees in the evening, dragging their exhausted bodies to campuses after work.

Obviously, many are studying for the purpose of career advancement rather than exploring academic disciplines like science or humanities.