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Education

outbreak of COVID-19, the bureau accepted applications from all public-sector and DSS schools implementing e-learning. The bureau also provides a one-off subsidy to schools for the additional expense of purchasing portable Wi-Fi routers and/or mobile data cards for financially needy primary and secondary students for their home e-learning.

Post-secondary Education

The government supports the parallel and complementary development of the publicly funded and self-financing post-secondary education. Hong Kong has 22 local degree-awarding post-secondary education institutions, including eight universities funded by the UGC, the publicly funded HKAPA, the self-financing Open University of Hong Kong, the VTC's Technological and Higher Education Institute of Hong Kong, and 11 post-secondary colleges registered under the Post Secondary Colleges Ordinance. The eight UGC-funded universities are City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Baptist University, Lingnan University, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the Education University of Hong Kong, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and the University of Hong Kong. In addition, the Hong Kong Art School (a division of Hong Kong Arts Centre) and six registered schools offer locally accredited sub-degree programmes.

In terms of full-time studies in the 2020-21 academic year, the UGC-funded universities and the HKAPA together provided around 15,200 publicly funded, first-year-first-degree intake places, while self-financing undergraduate programmes offered about 9,700 places. The UGC-funded universities and the self-financing, degree-awarding institutions also provided around 5,000 senior-year undergraduate intake places and 9,500 top-up degree places respectively, mainly for sub-degree graduates. At sub-degree level, about 18,500 self-financing and 9,900 publicly funded intake places were available.

At postgraduate level, about 2,600 and 5,600 UGC-funded taught and research places were available in 2020-21 respectively. As regards self-financing places, taught and research programmes registered actual enrolments of 43,300 and 4,300 respectively in 2019-20.

Under the Ministry of Education's Scheme for Admission of Hong Kong Students to Mainland Higher Education Institutions, some Mainland higher education institutions admit Hong Kong students on the basis of their HKDSE Examination results and exempt them from taking the Joint Entrance Examination for Universities on the Mainland. In 2021-22, the number of participating institutions will increase from 122 to 127 across 21 Mainland provinces and municipalities and one autonomous region. In 2020-21, over 3,900 Hong Kong students applied and about 2,000 were offered places.

Research

The government attaches great importance to supporting research conducted by the higher education sector. It accepted in full the recommendations of the Task Force on Review of Research Policy and Funding. Major follow-up initiatives include increasing research funding substantially through a $20 billion injection into the Research Endowment Fund, setting up a $3 billion, three-year Research Matching Grant Scheme in 2019, and introducing three recurrent fellowship schemes for researchers from 2019-20.

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