Page 8 - FSTE A5 Handbook

General Education Practices in Hong Kong
Foreword

“Select the best and leave the rest” was a maxim among educators in an earlier era. Sometimes
called meritocracy, this approach may have made sense when society needed only a small
portion of its people to fill the professions and leadership roles. Student places in higher
education were correspondingly limited. “The rest” would work in their family businesses or
find their own way in an industrial economy of mostly routine work.

But Hong Kong’s economy has gone way past this stage. Now the challenge is to equip as many
young people as possible with the skills required to succeed in a post-industrial economy and
move into, or at least stay within, the middle class. A combination of automation technologies
based on artificial intelligence, and open regimes of talent migration, are changing the nature
of work and reducing the number of jobs that do not require cognitive intensity. Meanwhile,
jobs requiring cognitive intensity, for which a university education is essential, will grow.
Thus higher education systems in developed economies like Hong Kong will need to prepare
a majority of its school leavers with high-quality tertiary education that is aligned with the
needs and character of our fast-changing 21 century workplace. Societies that prepare a large
st
proportion of their youth with the skills, knowledge and attitudes for this future will thrive.
Those that do not, will not.
In the past 20 years, Hong Kong has expanded tertiary education in the 3-3-4 framework
and diversified its curriculum by creating General Education or common core programs that
stress a balance of both breadth and depth of learning. We at the HKAC are pleased to have
had the opportunity, through the Fulbright exchange program, and Mr. Po Chung’s generous
contributions to it, to participate in this creative effort at both degree and sub-degree levels.
In this same period, Hong Kong also fostered a vastly expanded sub-degree sector that has
given school leavers much expanded access to tertiary education, well beyond the 60% initially
targeted by the EMB. This market-driven, lightly-subsidized sector has attracted significant new
investment into Hong Kong higher education, mainly in the form of tuition from parents. Over
the past 15 years, this movement, sustained by the institutional members of Federation for
Self-financing Tertiary Education (FSTE), has created a more diverse landscape of educational
opportunities for Hong Kong’s young people beyond the eight public universities. Bravo for
them, and for their graduates.

This sector now faces two major challenges. The first is to improve the alignment between
the UGC-funded universities and the sub-degree programs. The second is to respond to the
demographic curve of declining cohorts of 18-year-olds leaving Hong Kong school in the
coming decade.

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