The number of children of non-local professionals enrolled into public universities almost trebled over the last two years, prompting the education authorities to consider finding extra undergraduate places for them to avoid competition with Hong Kong students.

Secretary for Education, Christine Choi Yuk-lin, on Wednesday said that the result of a review into the definition of local students – prompted by complaints of local parents regarding the influx of dependents under the city’s talent scheme – would be announced before the next round of applications for publicly funded undergraduate programmes.

“The other thing is to find some places so that it does not affect the 15,000 opportunities of our local students. This is one of the plans we are studying,” she said, on the number of first-year-first degree places for local students every year.

Choi said in a Legislative Council meeting that there were around 132,000 children aged under 18 permitted to come to Hong Kong as dependents under the various talent admission schemes during the period from 2022 to 2025.

While the immigration authorities did not provide a breakdown of ages, Choi revealed a significant increase in the number of dependents admitted to public universities through the central allocation programme, Joint University Programmes Admissions System (Jupas).

“According to the JUPAS Office, the number of dependents admitted to University Grants Committee-funded first-year-first degree programmes through the JUPAS route in the three years from the 2022-23 to 2024-25 academic years were 62, 68 and 185 respectively,” Choi said.