Education 18.com & the Public Opinion Program

In 2005 education18.com, a division of Media Education Info-Tech Co., Ltd, a consulting business for offshore education providers, produced its fifth annual survey of Cantonese-speaking public opinion on Hong Kong’s eight public universities.

Methodology

Public Opinion Program, a University of Hong Kong research department contracted by Education18 to conduct the survey, stresses that the methodology for all five years of the study has never been consistent, in line with annual requests by Education18 for differing ranking emphases, and therefore warns that direct comparison between the annual results should be done with caution and awareness of the altered methodology.

For the 2005 survey 1,517 Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong residents aged 18 or above were interviewed, with a response rate of just over 60 percent. Respondents were asked to rate Hong Kong’s universities on a scale of 0-10 according to seven broad criteria: overall performance (taking into account the universities’ local and international reputations, facilities, campus environment, qualification of teaching staff, academic research performance, conduct and quality of students, general learning atmosphere, as well as the diversification and degree of recognition of courses); selectivity (average A-Level scores of incoming freshmen); research funding (success rate in applying for research grants); overall impression of schools’ graduates among human resource professional and recruiters; research output (scholarly books, journals, conference papers, literary works, patents, and other output); student-teacher ratio; library resources per student (including print and e-resources); and performance of vice-chancellor/president.

Results

The 2005 results for each category are available from the following links:

• Overall performance
• Ranking by admission requirements
• Ranking by research funding
• Reputation of graduates in the workforce
• Research output (2003)
• Student-teacher ratio
• Library facilities (2004)
• Overall opinion of vice-chancellor/president

The overall institutional ranking for 2005 was established using the following weightings:

1. Public impressions (20%)
2. Admissions grades (20%)
3. Research performance (20%)
4. Performance of graduates (10%)
5. Research output (10%)
6. Student-teacher ratio (10%)
7. Library facilities (10%)

Results from the previous four rankings (with assessments in other categories) are also available from the education18.com website.

Hong Kong’s eight universities were ranked in 2005 thus:

Source: education18.com