The University of Hong Kong

HKU is at Pok Fu Lam on Hong Kong Island. Founded in 1911, it was the first university in Hong Kong. The campus is built up the hillside, and walking from the university station to the faculties means climbing. The undergraduate degree is four years, teaching is mainly in English, and daily life is lived in a city where Cantonese, Putonghua and English overlap. Medicine, business, architecture, and arts and sciences each have their own faculty, and the application materials are not one set.

Design+ (BASc Design+) sits in the Faculty of Architecture. It is four years and combines design studios with an interdisciplinary major, and you must also take a second major or two minors. The Master of Marketing is a taught postgraduate programme in the Business School, which looks at undergraduate grades, prerequisites and the personal statement, and is entirely a different form from undergraduate design or medicine. The admission logic of medicine and business is further apart still: one looks at science prerequisites and interviews, the other at grades, activities and quantitative courses.

For families from the Chinese mainland, it is often the option close to home that still requires getting through an English-language classroom. A Hong Kong university is not a transposition of the mainland gaokao, nor a UK degree scaled down by a size. GPA has to be managed from the first semester. For those who care more about college life and a balance of Chinese and English, CUHK belongs in the same season.