Fostering collaborations

Updated on: Monday, December 13, 2010

What are your reasons for attracting international students, especially Indian students?

Having more international students in our campuses will further internationalise our higher education institutions and increase the exposure of our local students. Furthermore, in order to maintain competitive in an increasingly globalised world, we need to continue to nurture talent. Attracting and retaining promising non-local students will enhance the quality of our workforce by embracing cultural and ethnic diversity which is beneficial to the long-term development of Hong Kong.

This will in turn strengthen Hong Kong’s role as Asia’s world city, and as an international business and financial centre.

How important do you feel, India is to you?
We see India as a strong strategic partner and would like to develop broader and deeper collaboration with it with a view to achieving a win-win situation for both sides. India and Hong Kong have a lot of things in common. Both of us attach great importance to education, science and technology and English is the language of education and business. India and China are widely perceived to provide a twin-engine for global economic growth in the next decade. With Hong Kong at the gateway to the mainland of China, we believe that we can work together in nurturing talent for the future.

Do you have any scholarships for Indian or international students?
We have established a $1 billion HKSAR Government Scholarship Fund to provide scholarships to outstanding local and non-local students. Non-local recipients receive government scholarships of $80,000 Hong Kong dollars (`4.7 lakhs) a year. We have also launched the Hong Kong Ph.D. Fellowship Scheme with a view to attracting the best and brightest students around the world to pursue their Ph.D. programmes in Hong Kong.

Successful applicants will receive $240,000 Hong Kong dollars (`14 lakhs) a year as a stipend plus other research-related allowances. The University of Hong Kong (HKU) has announced a new scholarship scheme for Indian students who are offered admission to HKU, including First in the Family Scholar-ships, Top Scorers Scholarships and Entrance Scholarships.

What are your plans to promote Hong Kong as a desired education destination?
The government is strongly supportive of our institutions’ effort to internationalise. In 2008, we implemented a basket of measures to promote the internationalisation of our higher education sector. To be more specific, we have doubled the quota of non-local students to 20 per cent in our public institutions. We have also relaxed immigration restrictions to allow non-local students to take on internships, summer jobs and on-campus part-time jobs, as well as stay in Hong Kong without limitation for 12 months after graduation. University graduates had a lower than 4 per cent unemployment rate last year. In some institutions the figure was as low as 0.2 per cent.

With the foreign education Bill in the pipeline, will you support the initiative of any of your universities to open a full-fledged campus in India?
Our institutions do not have plans to open full-fledged campuses in India at this stage. Nevertheless, they will all continue to work at strengthening collaboration at the institution level including research, student exchange etc.

Fostering collaborations

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