Hong Kong will add five universities to the list of eligible higher education institutions under its Top Talent Pass Scheme (TTPS) while removing four from the pool, raising the number of eligible institutions in the program from 199 to 200.
Lawrence Tang Fei, a legislator-cum-educator, said on Monday the move demonstrates the program’s “flexibility”, “open-mindedness”, and “professionalism” for recruiting global talent, and urged it to adopt more targeted goals to lure talent whose expertise could shore up the city’s strategic positioning.
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.
Tang said the adjustment can supply “forward-looking” potential by proactively adding growing universities to its eligible list.
Speaking to China Daily, Tang said the list ensures Hong Kong’s talent pipeline stays attuned to the dynamic geography of global academia, effectively enabling the world’s most promising graduates to contribute to the city’s future development.
“What the update has epitomized is a highly flexible, open-minded, and professional approach to global talent attraction,” he said.
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.
Three years after TTPS’ launch, Tang suggested that the program can be refined to match talent needs in support of the strategic roles earmarked for Hong Kong by the upcoming 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-30), helping the city serve as a “spot-on” facilitator for the nation’s overall progress.
In the near and medium term, the program could include more institutions with proven excellence in areas that are more aligned with national development goals and Hong Kong’s talent demands for its strategic industries, such as universities specializing in finance, trade, and innovation and technology sectors, said Tang.
Responding to a lawmaker’s enquiry in July, Secretary for Labour and Welfare Chris Sun Yuk-han said among the nearly 100,000 TTPS applications approved from March 2023 to the end of June this year, 26,211 applicants declared that their previous work was in the I&T-related sectors.
Contact the writer at wanqing@chinadailyhk.com
