Academics from Hong Kong outnumbered by mainland Chinese, foreigners for first time at local universities
- University vice-president says emigration wave and retirements have caused share of scholars from Hong Kong to drop, with mainland Chinese readily filling vacancies
- First time that mainland Chinese scholars and those from rest of world have accounted for greater share of academic staff population than locals
The proportion of scholars from Hong Kong among academic staff at the city’s public universities has fallen behind that of counterparts from mainland China and the rest of the world for the first time in recent decades.
A university vice-president attributed the shift to the citywide emigration wave and recent retirements from a generation of baby boomers born in the 1960s, saying vacancies were mainly filled by mainlanders who found the research environment in Western countries somewhat hostile amid heightened geopolitical tensions.
Data from the University Grants Committee, which allocates funding to the institutions, puts the academic staff population in three official categories: Hong Kong, mainland China and the rest of the world.
The number of scholars from Hong Kong stood at 1,659 in all the eight publicly funded universities in the current academic year, down from 1,924 in 2018-19. They accounted for 30.7 per cent of the total academic population, compared with 40 per cent in 2018-19 when they were the largest group.
Only two of the universities employed more mainland academics than their local counterparts in 2018-19. But now, mainlanders outnumber locals at six universities – with Baptist University and the Education University of Hong Kong the two where they do not account for the largest share.
The universities employed 2,070 academics from the mainland in the current school year, or 38.3 per cent of all recruits.
