This paper offers a qualitative analysis of decisions of 64 community-college students in seeking a transfer in Hong Kong. In weighing a number of educational options and then offers, with a similar level of desirability in some cases, in order to achieve their transfers, advantaged-class and disadvantaged-class respondents struggled with different logics of reasoning and negotiated anxiously with their changing structural realities. This qualitative analysis addresses the contextual, processual and emotional aspects of their decision making and provides a more convincing illustration of how the secondary effect of social stratification operates against a changing landscape of higher education. Copyright © 2023 SAGE Publications.

Concerns of equity with respect to the community college model in East Asia persist in educational research. In this study, we described and analysed students’ “lived experience” in community colleges in Hong Kong in terms of the “warming up” or “cooling out” of their educational desire. Semistructured interviews with 14 graduates of community colleges in Hong Kong were conducted to determine how their experiences at community colleges affected their educational expectations and the extent to which community colleges help students reconsider their educational disadvantages in a competitive, meritocratic and massified higher education system. The qualitative interview data were inductively thematised into four aspects of college experience in relation to their educational expectations. The data revealed that Hong Kong’s community colleges help some students develop their capabilities and change their educational expectations through democratic admissions, liberal pedagogic environments, learner-centred formative assessment and student services for strategic university articulation. Rather than cooling-out students’ educational desire (characterised by gradual disengagement, objective denial, alternative achievement), community colleges in Hong Kong provide a second chance for failing and disadvantaged students to pursue a university education, but this warming-up function applies only to students who benefitted from the liberal mode of assessment and discovered and developed their academic capabilities in their college experience. The paper ends with a critical analysis of the problem of such warming up of educational desire and the extent to which community colleges can empower disadvantaged students for a good life. Copyright © 2022 The Australian Association for Research in Education, Inc.

It was explained that education was not important in the earliest colonial period where the colony only contained small Hong Kong Island from 1841 to 1860. The disagreement of this conclusion was found and actually education was one of the major governmental concerns. Britain was starting that education should be funded by public money and the public education system was not yet well established at that time. The Hong Kong government laid special stress on educating Hong Kong pupils in order to facilitate governance, business and building community and citizenship of Hong Kong during this early colonial period. We can criticize the government which did not spend enough money for education, but it is observable that the education policy was initiated and adjusted to suit for the development of the community. The fact must be re-constructed historically.
[Copyright © 2014 Maryland Institute of Research (MIR)]

This paper explores the effect of globalization on the community college in China's two systems -Hong Kong and the mainland, and the extent to which globalization was resisted in the implementation of the American community college model. It also assesses the future prospects of the community colleges in these two regions, especially in terms of the values of democracy and equality that helped sustain it in the United States.
本文旨在探討在全球化的影響下，中國兩個不同制度的地區，即大陸與香港在實踐以美式社區學院為楷模的概況。同時亦評估這些社區學院在兩地區的未來發展，特別是對民主價值及平等理念等，而這些觀念向來都是美國社區學院所珍視的辦學理念。
[Copyright of Hong Kong Teachers' Centre Journal is the property of Hong Kong Teachers' Centre at http://www.edb.org.hk/hktc]