Mainland Chinese student Corner Zhang, 18, is searching for a place to stay for his second year at a university in Hong Kong after his application for campus housing was rejected.
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He had a shared dormitory room for his first year, but publicly funded Baptist University in Kowloon Tong has not assured him of accommodation for the new academic year, which begins in September.
Like other universities in the city, it does not have enough student housing for everyone who applies. Baptist University only guarantees housing to locals for a year and to non-locals in their first year of study.
“Half the non-local students I know are in the same situation,” Zhang said.
While the number of local students in full-time undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in the current academic year dropped by around 0.5 per cent to 115,298 from a decade ago, the number of non-locals more than doubled to 76,325 from 27,187 in 2015-16, according to official data.
The shortage of student housing has become a pressing problem even as city leader John Lee Ka-chiu pledged in his policy blueprint last year to make Hong Kong a global post-secondary education hub and attract more overseas students through scholarships and other incentives.
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