Council Chairmen, Vice-Chancellors, Presidents, Colleagues, Ladies and Gentlemen,

I am delighted to have been invited to attend this Higher Education Expo 1998 and to say a few words to this distinguished audience. I should first, however, like to congratulate the organisers of the event, the Higher Education External Relations Association of Hong Kong (HEERA), for once again mounting this exhibition.

This year's Expo is the second one organised by HEERA and I expect that it will again be a great success. Hong Kong's higher education sector has a lot to be proud of, and this Expo will, I am sure, help to open many people's eyes to the institutions' achievements in teaching, learning, research and service.

As this is likely to be my last official public engagement as the Chairman of the UGC, I would like to take this opportunity to recap some of the major achievements of the sector in the past years and to look forward.

As you all know, the higher education sector has seen unprecedented growth in the past seven years. The Government took a conscious policy decision in 1989 to increase the availability of degree-level education locally (in terms of increasing the age participation rate of the relevant age group to 18%). As a result, the numbers of first-year-first-degree places in UGC-funded institutions were doubled in five years, from about 7,500 in 1989 to 14,500 by 1994-95. Total enrolments in the institutions increased from about 42,000 full-time equivalent in 1990-91 to nearly 58,000 in 1994­95. At the same time the numbers of postgraduate student places were also increased by some 170%. To cope with this major expansion in numbers, the recurrent grants to the institutions had to be increased by about 77% from 1991-92 to 1994­95 (from about $4.3 billion to $7.7 billion). Within this period, the number of self-accrediting higher education institutions also increased from three to six. In addition, the Hong Kong Institute of Education was also brought under the aegis of the UGC in 1996.

The sheer size of the expansion, and the short time horizon within which it had to be achieved, called for careful and imaginative management on the part of the institutions and the UGC. I am pleased to say, and the results speak for themselves, that we managed to achieve the targets not only on time but also in a way that allowed the institutions to evolve and grow while maintaining their distinctive characters, roles and missions.

The UGC and the institutions, of course, were well aware of the quality assurance problems which could arise as a result of such rapid expansion. The primary responsibility for quality assurance in respect of their academic activities rests with the institutions themselves. However the UGC also has an important role to play in assuring the quality of education provision in all the UGC-funded institutions. Even before the expansion period was over, the UGC had embarked on various quality assurance initiatives such as the Teaching and Learning Quality Process Reviews (TLQPRs), and the first Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). These activities, which were in addition to our other ongoing institutional and sectoral reviews, have been carried on into the current triennium 1995-1998.

After the period of rapid expansion, the tertiary sector has entered a period of consolidation which the Government, the UGC and the sector agree should focus on improving quality and efficiency.

This is not to say that the UGC agrees with the argument, which it considers to be grossly exaggerated, that 'more means worse' and that the quality of students has gone down simply because of wider access.

On the other hand, the UGC is well aware of the concerns expressed by the community in general and employers in particular about the need to enhance students' language and communication skills so as to equip them better for employment. This is an issue to which the UGC has paid particular attention, providing some $217.5 million in language enhancement grants in the current triennium to support institutions' own efforts in organizing language enhancement activities for their undergraduates.

The TLQPRs were reviews of the teaching and learning processes of the institutions, rather than the actual quality of teaching and learning in institutions per se. They actually represented a ground-breaking approach, even in international terms. The first round of reviews of the then seven UGC-funded institutions was completed last year. Although the reviews did not directly assess the quality of teaching and learning, the TLQPRs served to reassure the UGC that teaching and learning quality processes in all the institutions are broadly satisfactory. More importantly, by focussing attention on teaching and learning as the primary mission of our institutions, the quality assurance and improvement processes appear to be getting better.

Apart from these reviews, the UGC has also implemented a number of other measures aimed at assuring the quality of teaching and learning. These include a review of research postgraduate education, focussing on the quality of research training and supervision of postgraduate students, and the provision of teaching development grants to encourage the development of innovative approaches to teaching and learning.

The UGC has so far conducted two Research Assessment Exercises, the first in 1993 and the second in 1996. Although these exercises were mainly funding related, since they aimed to assess the research output performance of the UGC-funded institutions so as to form the basis for allocating some of the research portion of the institutions' recurrent grants, the quality threshold of the 1996 RAE was also deliberately set higher than that of the 1993 RAE. This was a natural development given that the research culture in the UGC-funded institutions has flourished in keeping with the expansion of higher education and the recruitment of substantial numbers of research-active staff from overseas. In fact, according to a recent study by the United Kingdom's Office of Science and Technology, Hong Kong is one of the places having the fastest growth in refereed research output in the world. Incidentally, the science magazine "Nature", in its September 1997 edition, cited the Hong Kong RAE as one of the more sophisticated RAEs conducted in the South East Asian region.

The activities of the Research Grants Council (RGC) have also contributed significantly to the growth in research. During the past seven years of the RGC's operation, it has awarded 2,374 project grants for a total of $1,220 million. According to members with experience in other competitive research granting systems, the top 10% - 15% of project proposals submitted for consideration by the RGC in recent years would have been competitive anywhere in the world.

To continue with our major quality assurance initiatives, the UGC will undertake management reviews of the institutions during the next triennium. The significant expansion in the higher education sector in recent years has presented new challenges to the management of institutions in Hong Kong as in many other places around the world. In addition, the more performance and output related funding methodology adopted by the UGC in 1995 has meant that institutions have to prioritise their programmes within overall approved student numbers and financial limits. To encourage institutions to make efforts to reflect upon their management, the UGC has decided to undertake management reviews of the institutions. I should like to emphasise that these reviews will not be management audits. They are meant primarily to support the institutions in enhancing the quality of their management; and to focus attention on and to enhance the effectivenesss of institutions' internal resource allocation, planning and financial processes. However they will also help to discharge the UGC's and the institutions' responsibility to ensure that public funds and resources are managed appropriately.

What I have outlined so far are initiatives aimed at the institutions to assure the quality of education delivered. But what about the student experience? The UGC believes that higher education should be more than learning from lectures or research. Students should be able to enjoy a balanced development by being able to participate in campus life, by being exposed to different ideas and cultures not only from their lecturers and professors, but also from their peers. To this end, I am pleased and grateful that the Government has agreed to embark on an ambitious student hostel building programme aimed at providing some 11,000 more student hostel places in the next five years. When this programme is completed, each undergraduate will enjoy at least one year of hostel life during his/her undergraduate studies. To enrich the student experience, the proportion of non-local students that institutions can enrol has also been expanded to 4% for undergraduate and taught postgraduate programmes, and one-third for research postgraduate programmes. I am sure that when all these policies start to take effect, our local undergraduates and graduates will stand to gain both intellectually and emotionally. However, to assess the changing nature of student life in Hong Kong, we are supporting a study aimed at evaluating the current student experience.

I have perhaps gone on for too long. But this serves only to underline the point I made at the outset, that Hong Kong's higher education sector has many achievements and a lot to be proud of. Academics and higher education institutions are not, by their nature, publicity seeking, but I think the higher education sector now needs to engage itself in a lot more activities like the present Higher Education Expo to let the public know of its achievements.

A lot more is expected of the UGC and its funded institutions these days. The aspiration to become a regional centre for higher education through the push for even higher quality in teaching, learning, research and service; more exchanges with the mainland and other international academic bodies; the development of areas of excellence; the enrichment of the student experience; and the development and transmission of culture are just some of the challenges facing the UGC and the institutions. I am sure that under the leadership of the incoming Chairman of the UGC, Dr Edgar Cheng, someone who I think is uniquely qualified for this role, these challenges will be taken up by the UGC and the institutions with enthusiasm and confidence.

Last but not the least, I should like to thank you for your support and assistance rendered so generously to me during my past five years' tenure as Chairman of the UGC. It has been my great privilege and honour to have served Hong Kong in this capacity. I hope that you will extend the same level of support and assistance to my successor. I also wish Edgar, the UGC, and all the higher education institutions success in their future endeavours.

Thank you.