HKU sets aside HK$80m fund to attract top students

The University of Hong Kong has unveiled an HK$80 million fund dedicated to entrance scholarships for local students this year, ahead of the release of the Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education (DSE) exam results on Wednesday.

The flagship award, the "President's Scholar", will be presented to the top-scoring DSE candidate in each faculty.

Beyond the academic honour, recipients will receive an additional HK$100,000 to support tuition fees and participation in enrichment programmes.

For those who achieve perfect scores across seven or more subjects, the university offers an even more generous package that amounts to up to HK$1 million and includes full tuition waivers, living allowances and grants for overseas academic pursuits.

In an attempt to broaden access and recognise diverse academic talent, the university has also rolled out the "HKU First in the School Scholarship".

This initiative specifically targets the best-performing DSE student from schools that have recently had their first-ever student admitted to the university.

On the admissions front, Bennett Yim, director of undergraduate admissions and international student exchange, said HKU has allocated a larger share of places for Jupas applicants this year than the past year, with these spots accounting for over 60 percent of the total enrolment quota.

He added that around 45 percent of students nominated by their schools were accepted under HKU's school nominations direct admission scheme – a programme that recognises the talents of local students that could not be fully assessed through the DSE system.

"The student distribution is quite broad from the faculty of arts, the faculty of business and economics, the faculty of education, and our medical and health-related programmes, and certainly our faculty of engineering and faculty of science as well," Yim said.

"We are not seeing the students only clustered in one or two specific programmes or specific faculty."

Yim stressed that the scheme does not just focus on DSE results but also students' talents in other areas.

"Many of them are top students in terms of academics, but most of them also have other talents that they demonstrate to us," he said.

"For example, some of them have already developed apps and even started NGOs. They are also showing very strong leadership, community service, curiosity and also achievements in the technology side as well."

To help candidates navigate the complex application landscape, HKU has launched an interactive "Jupas score calculator".

By simply selecting their preferred programme and inputting their individual subject results, students can instantly compute their scores under that programme's distinct weighting and scoring formula.

Edited by Tony Sabine ...