Tighten Rules For Tertiary Institutes: Task Force

A task force appointed by the government has urged the government to tighten regulations for private tertiary institutions in a bid to improve the quality of their programmes.

This come after a sharp rise in the number of programmes offered by privately-run institutes in the past two decades. From 2005 to 2015, the number of such degree programmes rose almost fourfold – from 40 to 150.

The chairman of the Task Force on Review of Self-financing Post-secondary Education, Professor Anthony Cheung, said the tertiary education sector “has reached a level of saturation now” as the number of secondary school graduates keeps dropping.

"An institution should be able to articulate its strategic objectives, what it aims to deliver in terms of provision of higher education for Hong Kong, how it will propose to respond to society’s needs, how is it going to produce talent to fit the need for human resources," Cheung said.

The task force said that authorities should revoke the licences of the operators if they fail to develop according to submitted plans after a “reasonably long trial period”.

Its other recommendations include clearly positioning associate degree courses, compared to diploma courses on offer, provide loans for institutions to change to a "new regulatory framework" and improve the coordination between each other.

"The views that we have heard seem to suggest that, yes, we need to improve the associate degree level education, but there’s a need to keep the two qualifications. That’s why our present proposal is to sharpen the role differentiation, the positioning between the two qualifications, but at the same time to by and large retain the binary system," Cheung said.

A public consultation on the recommendations started on Monday and will run until the end of August.