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Driving Excellence through Enhancing Competitiveness

It is entrenched in UGC’s mission statement that we aspire to work closely with institutions to pursue excellence at the international level. This is paramount in keeping Hong Kong at the forefront of the increasingly competitive global arena amongst many advanced economies in the region. We are pleased to note that the efforts and achievement of our institutions have been well recognised, as reflected by a number of international university rankings. With the objective of promoting a differentiated yet interlocking system among the eight UGC-funded institutions, we strongly believe that focusing scarce public resources on areas of excellence in the individual institutions in which they can aspire to international competitiveness on the one hand, and encourage collaboration and sharing of academic and administrative functions and practices on the other, will serve the best interests of Hong Kong.

With this in mind, the UGC will continue to introduce moderate measures to increase competitiveness in its triennial academic development planning process, in order to encourage institutions to strategically think through their entire institutional endeavour, their strengths and weaknesses, and formulate development plans that respond to community needs.

The Academic Development Proposals Exercise

The UGC conducts academic planning and recurrent grants assessment with its funded institutions on a triennial basis. The forthcoming funding period is 2012/13 to 2014/15, the planning of which has already commenced. As in previous periods, the UGC requires institutions to submit Academic Development Proposals setting out their plans for the 2012-15 triennium. 

The UGC has no intention to micro-manage our institutions, and is thus primarily concerned with strategic issues and performance rather than a high level of detail of individual programme offerings in the Academic Development Proposals exercise (unless there are implications on meeting Government’s specific manpower requirements).

Institutions stay closely attuned to changing societal needs in determining their future programme offerings. However, given the finite number of publicly-funded student places, we need to have a mechanism to re-distribute places across disciplines to allow institutions to re-instate, introduce new programmes, and phase-out obsolete ones, so as to stay competitive, consistent with its role and fit-for-purpose. It must be stressed that this is not to push institutions artificially to develop “eye-catching” new programmes, or needlessly to slim or eliminate existing programmes.

The UGC continued to operate a Competitive Allocation Mechanism, under which each institution sets aside 6% of First-Year-First-Degree (FYFD) places (4% for LU) to a central pool for re-distribution among institutions to reflect comparative merit among themselves as assessed against agreed criteria. In the process, institutions strategically reviewed their academic profile and identified and prioritised areas of programmes considered fit for slimming and expanding (if any), that would be conducive to enhancing and sharpening their role.

The Academic Development Proposals exercise is interactive and transparent. We consulted institutions, and took their views on board, before taking forward the rules, evaluation criteria, procedure and principles of the exercise.

We have also publicised the four broad evaluation criteria used to evaluate institutions’ Academic Development Proposals as follows:

1. Strategy – The institution has a strategy which enables it to deliver high quality and internationally competitive taught programmes which are consistent with its role; and which incorporates, where appropriate, collaboration with other institutions and the provision of any relevant self-financing activities.

2. Teaching & Learning – The institution provides teaching and learning opportunities which are effective in enabling students to achieve outcomes which: (a) attest to personal and intellectual development; (b) match international standards for the award of degrees; (c) prepare students for their careers, and (d) meet the needs of Hong Kong. 

3. Advanced Scholarship – The institution engages effectively in advanced scholarship appropriate to its role, and uses that scholarship to inform its undergraduate teaching and future research activity.

4. Community (including Culture and Businesses) – The institution has working relationships with the community (including businesses) that are appropriate to its role, which facilitate knowledge transfer and inform its teaching; and contributes to the transmission and preservation of cultural value. 

The dedicated group under UGC responsible for the Academic Development Proposals exercise met with institutions face-to-face in April 2011 to exchange views on the latter’s plans. We aim at informing institutions of UGC’s advice on their proposals in June 2011. 

Enhancing Competitiveness in Research Funding

The two areas of focus are the balance between the magnitude of the research portion of the block grant and RGC grants; and the allocation of research postgraduate places. At the same time, UGC is mindful of reinforcing institutional autonomy, in that the allocation of resources within an institution is a matter for the institution. UGC has all along advocated the pursuit of “excellence” by the academic community and strongly believes in “competition drives excellence”. This was proven over and again in other aspects of our society, and in other parts of the world. UGC also strongly believes that our institutions have outstanding students and professors who can conduct excellent world-class research.

Looking to the future, Hong Kong institutions have to face the intensified challenges from the region and the rest of the world. There is a need for UGC to enhance the current funding mechanism, in order to strengthen the competitiveness of Hong Kong’s institutions. 

Currently, the research element of the block grant is by far the largest source of research funds – $2.7 billion per annum, whereas the amount granted for peer assessed research projects under the RGC is less than $800 million per annum. We have examined the situation of other jurisdictions where such a dual funding model is employed and believe that the balance in Hong Kong needs to be adjusted so that more funding is provided in association with research projects. The UGC is working towards the goal of allocating about $1.3 billion within the research element of the block grant on a more competitive basis in a period of nine years. If an institution is very successful in the project competitions, the institution would gain more funding, and vice versa. An important point is that funding to be allocated competitively will be returned to the institutions (not the Principal Investigators) as indirect costs for deployment by the Heads of Institutions. Through this, the real costs of doing research will be properly identified and funded.

The allocation of the bulk of the research postgraduate places has been historically based. During the 2009-12 triennium, 800 new additional research postgraduate places were granted to UGC by the Government, and competitive allocation was introduced for these additional places. UGC has decided that within five years from 2012/13, half of all research postgraduate places will be allocated through various means of competition, making reference to performance, quality assessment or results in project funding schemes, etc.

New methods to allocate research postgraduate places competitively include putting places to the Hong Kong PhD Fellowship Scheme; allocation based on past award results in RGC/UGC funding schemes; allocation on the basis of the latest Research Assessment Exercise or its equivalent assessment exercise; proxy attachment to excellent RGC projects; and allocation informed by an outcome-based evaluation of research postgraduate programmes. We are now working with the institutions on setting out the best mechanisms to take the matter further.


UGC plans to improve the existing funding mechanism by linking research funding with top quality research so as to enhance the competitiveness of our institutions

Copyright © 2011 University Grants Committee. All rights reserved.
Last Revision Date: 1 June 2011