A Study on the Trends and Policy Impacts of Non-Local Undergraduate Admissions in Hong Kong Higher Education Institutions from 2014 to 2024

Abstract

Over the past century, internationalization of higher education in Hong Kong has grown more extensive, with an ever-larger proportion of non-local students especially from Mainland China, and about 25% of all students come from abroad now. To investigate the characteristics of non-local student enrollment during the next decade, this study examines the non-local student enrollment forecast over the period of 2014–2024 using publicly available data from the University Grants Committee of Hong Kong and all eight major universities and applies time series analysis, event studies, and multiple regression analysis to determine these trends and causes. The results show that: First, from 2014 to 2024, the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of non-local student enrollments reached 4.2%, with its proportion of total enrollment increasing from 19% in 2014 to 25% in 2024; Second, the percentage of mainland students of all non-local students dropped from 76.63% to 67.20% between 2014 and 2019 before rebounding sharply afterwards, with the percentage being around 77.34% in 2023; Third, although the pandemic in 2020 shockingly curbed the enrollment growth of non-local students, their application level returned back to that of before the pandemic in 2021. This study, employing R language for cleaning data and building models to explain the logic behind the internationalization process of higher education in Hong Kong, serves as a reference for future policies.