Hong Kong universities are rapidly gaining favour among mainland Chinese families as they shun the intense domestic competition of the gaokao and uncertainties stemming from Sino-US tensions, embracing the city’s generous non-local admission quotas.

The Blue Book on Mainland Students Studying in Hong Kong released late last month underscores this trend, attributing it to geographic proximity, cultural familiarity, and pragmatic considerations regarding career prospects and residency planning, even as admission becomes fiercely competitive.

“In the past three to five years, the scale, structure and underlying logic of mainland students pursuing education in Hong Kong have undergone a qualitative change,” wrote the authors from Peking University’s Sustainability Research Institute and two education companies.

“What began as an elite pathway for a small number of top-performing students has evolved into a complex ecosystem spanning schooling, multiple undergraduate admission channels, a large-scale influx into taught master’s programmes, and ever-closer links between study, career planning and long-term residency status,” according to the report, unveiled in Beijing on April 26.

In the 2023-24 academic year, 38,100 non-local students were enrolled in Hong Kong’s taught postgraduate programmes, a staggering 207 per cent increase from 2020-21. At the University of Hong Kong (HKU) alone, mainland students accounted for 63.4 per cent of non-local undergraduates and an overwhelming 92.4 per cent of taught postgraduates, the authors wrote, citing data from the city’s Education Bureau.

The authors predict that Hong Kong will emerge as an “educational magnet” for mainland students, bolstered by policies that have doubled non-local student quotas to 40 per cent of local places starting from the 2024-25 academic year.