🇭🇰 8 UGC-funded universities · 22,310 first-year admissions · 2025/26
Hong Kong's eight UGC-funded universities — 28.7% of 2025/26's first-year intake came from outside Hong Kong.
How many first-year students each of the eight UGC-funded universities admitted every year since 2010/11, and from where — Hong Kong, the Chinese Mainland, elsewhere in Asia or the rest of the world — with senior-year admissions, staff and research grants, from the University Grants Committee.
First-year admissions, 2025/26 (FTE)
22,310
Non-local
28.7%
11.6% in 2010/11
From the Chinese Mainland
19.7%
4,387 FTE
Senior-year admissions, 2025/26 (FTE)
5,488
What this covers, and what isn't here
This covers the universities funded through the University Grants Committee, and only their UGC-funded places. Self-financing institutions — Hong Kong Metropolitan University and the Hang Seng University of Hong Kong, for example — and the self-financed programmes those universities also run are not in the UGC's datasets, so they are not listed here.
First-year-first-degree figures are admissions to the first year of a bachelor's degree on UGC-funded programmes, in full-time equivalents — not enrolment, and not headcount. Places on the same universities' self-financed programmes are not included.
Local students on UGC-funded places pay a tuition fee set by the Government; non-local students pay a higher fee that each university sets. Neither fee is in the open data used here — check the university's own admissions pages.
The open data has no entry scores, applications, fees or graduate outcomes per university, so this is a directory, not a matcher.
The eight UGC-funded universities
First-year-first-degree admissions in 2025/26, full-time equivalents, by place of origin; largest intake first. “Non-local” is the UGC's place-of-origin split: students from the Chinese Mainland, other places in Asia and the rest of the world. Where the file has no “rest of the world” row for a university and year, it is shown as “—” and the share is over the rows published.
| University | First-year admissions | Non-local | Chinese Mainland | Other Asia | Rest of world | Senior-year, 2025/26 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The University of Hong Kong香港大學 · HKU | 4,912 | 33.4% | 1,022 | 519 | 101 | 392 |
| The Chinese University of Hong Kong香港中文大學 · CUHK | 4,212 | 20.5% | 598 | 249 | 15 | 417 |
| The Hong Kong Polytechnic University香港理工大學 · PolyU | 3,509 | 31.1% | 673 | 338 | 82 | 1,762 |
| The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology香港科技大學 · HKUST | 3,210 | 29.5% | 590 | 301 | 57 | 162 |
| City University of Hong Kong香港城市大學 · CityU | 2,982 | 25.5% | 535 | 203 | 23 | 998 |
| Hong Kong Baptist University香港浸會大學 · HKBU | 1,772 | 35.2% | 534 | 69 | 20 | 912 |
| The Education University of Hong Kong香港教育大學 · EdUHK | 929 | 31.9% | 271 | 24 | 1 | 503 |
| Lingnan University嶺南大學 · LU | 784 | 23.1% | 164 | 15 | 2 | 342 |
Senior-year admissions are students admitted directly into a later year of a UGC-funded bachelor's degree rather than its first year, in full-time equivalents. The file lists full-time study only.
First-year admissions at the eight, 2010/11–2025/26
Our sums of the eight universities' rows, in full-time equivalents. 2012/13 was a double-cohort year: the last A-level and the first HKDSE students entered university together when Hong Kong moved to four-year degrees, so first-year admissions roughly doubled that year.
Non-local share of first-year admissions
| Year | All | Local | Chinese Mainland | Other Asia | Rest of world | Non-local |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025/26 | 22,310 | 15,904 | 4,387 | 1,718 | 301 | 28.7% |
| 2024/25 | 21,151 | 15,569 | 4,119 | 1,267 | 196 | 26.4% |
| 2023/24 | 19,703 | 15,936 | 2,656 | 950 | 161 | 19.1% |
| 2022/23 | 19,435 | 15,528 | 2,800 | 955 | 152 (1 with no row) | 20.1% |
| 2021/22 | 19,029 | 15,267 | 2,651 | 998 | 113 (1 with no row) | 19.8% |
| 2020/21 | 18,340 | 15,015 | 2,232 | 1,000 | 93 (1 with no row) | 18.1% |
| 2019/20 | 18,362 | 15,061 | 1,787 | 1,401 | 113 | 18.0% |
| 2018/19 | 18,367 | 15,042 | 1,720 | 1,472 | 133 (1 with no row) | 18.1% |
| 2017/18 | 18,096 | 15,153 | 1,705 | 1,144 | 94 (1 with no row) | 16.3% |
| 2016/17 | 17,851 | 15,066 | 1,670 | 1,034 | 81 (1 with no row) | 15.6% |
| 2015/16 | 17,410 | 14,848 | 1,624 | 858 | 80 (2 with no row) | 14.7% |
| 2014/15 | 17,309 | 14,749 | 1,646 | 817 | 97 (3 with no row) | 14.8% |
| 2013/14 | 17,089 | 14,643 | 1,614 | 748 | 84 (2 with no row) | 14.3% |
| 2012/13double cohort | 33,073 | 28,969 | 3,057 | 906 | 141 (2 with no row) | 12.4% |
| 2011/12 | 16,336 | 14,332 | 1,412 | 483 | 109 (2 with no row) | 12.3% |
| 2010/11 | 15,942 | 14,086 | 1,382 | 383 | 91 (2 with no row) | 11.6% |
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Source: University Grants Committee Secretariat, Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region — datasets “First-year-first-degree Student Admissions (Full-time equivalent) of UGC-funded Programmes by University and Place of Origin”, “Senior-year Student Admissions (Full-time equivalent) of UGC-funded Programmes by University and Mode of Study”, “Staff Number (Headcount) in Academic Departments of UGC-funded Universities by Source of Salary Funding, University, Staff Grade and Mode of Employment” and “Research grants for UGC-funded universities”, obtained from DATA.GOV.HK (https://data.gov.hk) and the Common Spatial Data Infrastructure (CSDI) Portal (https://portal.csdi.gov.hk). The intellectual property rights in the data belong to the Government of the Hong Kong SAR and the University Grants Committee. Sums, shares, abbreviations and the selection of years are CollegeMatcher's; CollegeMatcher is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Government or the UGC.