Hong Kong will add five universities to the list of eligible higher education institutions under the city’s Top Talent Pass Scheme while removing four from the pool, bringing the number in the program to 200.

Effective Thursday, the updated list sees five new entries: Australia’s Adelaide University, Austria’s University of Vienna, Germany’s Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Italy’s Politecnico di Milano, and the King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals in Saudi Arabia.

The four ousted schools are France’s Ecole Polytechnique, Universite Grenoble Alpes, and Universite Sorbonne Paris Cite-USPC, as well as Germany’s University of Freiburg.

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The annual update is in response to changes in international university rankings, the HKSAR government announced.

Introduced in December 2022, the program is open to high earners with an annual income of at least HK$2.5 million ($321,564), and graduates of listed universities with three or more years of recent work experience; the scheme also allows applications from recent graduates of those same universities with little to no work experience.

Eligibility for the top talent pass program aggregates the top 100 global institutions in four major university ranking tables over a rolling five-year window — the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, the Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) World University Rankings, the U.S. News and World Report’s Best Global Universities Rankings, and the Shanghai Jiao Tong University Academic Ranking of World Universities.

Designed to attract elite professionals as well as academics, the list has strategically included leading institutions placed in the top five globally by QS’s “hospitality and leisure management” and “art and design” rankings.

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Also included are the top 20 Chinese mainland universities from the Shanghai Jiao Tong University Best Chinese Universities Ranking over the last five years.

Contact the writer at wanqing@chinadailyhk.com