Universities in Hong Kong facing ‘crisis’ as teaching staff head for exits, warns head of city’s largest self-financing institution
- Paul Lam, president of Hong Kong Metropolitan University, reveals turnover hit 20 per cent at its peak amid a wave of emigration in the city
- ‘My original intention was to increase manpower, not to hire people to fill vacancies,’ he says
Staff turnover at Hong Kong’s largest self-financing university hit 20 per cent at its peak amid a wave of emigration, its head revealed on Thursday, warning the problem it and other tertiary institutions faced should be addressed before it became a crisis.
Professor Paul Lam Kwan-sing, president of Hong Kong Metropolitan University which has 393 staff members, said its nursing school was the hardest hit.
He said the city’s emigration wave had wrecked his plans to build a strong teaching team to boost the university’s reputation after he took office last year.
“My original intention was to increase manpower, not to hire people to fill vacancies. Why did people leave? There are many reasons and emigration is one of the reasons,” he said.
“If staff from the Hospital Authority resign, the authority will hire our teachers, the situation is like musical chairs.”
He noted the university was required to keep a certain teacher-to-student ratio in its nursing programmes. Lam added that the high turnover rate of its nursing school was a problem shared by other universities.
“Other [institutions] do not have enough [teaching staff] too, they compete with each other for manpower, and staff wages keep increasing,” he said, describing the problem as a challenge that needed to be addressed. “So we need to train more talent. It is not yet a crisis, and we will not let it turn into a crisis.”