Dancing with global trends: higher education policy and university governance in Hong Kong, 1997–2012

ABSTRACT

This article examines the significance of global trends in higher education (HE) development in Hong Kong between 1997 and 2012. Two trends, massification and internationalisation, are considered key driving forces that shaped Hong Kong’s HE policy during the period. The former refers to government measures to widen participation in HE. The latter is associated with Hong Kong’s regional education hub strategy. Universities in the city revised their governance structure in these contexts. The article first explains why massification and internationalisation entered the HE policy discourse in Hong Kong in the late 1990s, and how they were materialised by neoliberal practices in the 2000s. Subsequently, it reveals how the two trends influenced university governance by examining the development of the University of Hong Kong Group. Based on this review, this article argues that the HE development can be perceived as an extension of structural transformation of the Hong Kong economy.

KEYWORDS:

• Massification
• internationalisation
• higher education as an industry
• academic capitalism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

William Yat Wai Lo is Assistant Professor in the Department of International Education and Lifelong Learning, the Education University of Hong Kong. His research areas include higher education policy and comparative and international higher education with a focus on East Asia. His work appears in international peer reviewed journals.

A sociologist, Hei-hang Hayes Tang is interested in the fields of education policy, academic profession and youth studies. He is committed to create new knowledge in application for better education governance in the age of citizen activism, and for enhancing the alignment between education and the world of work/professions. The notions of democratisation in education, scholarship of application and academic entrepreneurialism inform his current research projects. He is now Assistant Professor of Education Policy at the Education University of Hong Kong . A new problem that Hayes has been engaging in is to examine the entrepreneurial intentions and entrepreneurial engagement of university graduates in East Asia.

Notes

1. The primary role of the UGC is to channel government funding to eight public HEIs. It also plays distinct roles to ensure that these institutions hold their accountability for effective use of public resources while maintaining their autonomy.

2. The section is adapted from Lo (2016a).

3. This section uses extensive materials from the working paper ‘International higher education in a marketised east Asian context: case study of the University of Hong Kong’ by Tang, H.H. and Tsui, C.P.