This study addresses the link between overeducation and intention to migrate to the Greater Bay Area (GBA) cities in mainland China in a sample of Hong Kong’s young adults employed in lower occupational classes (elementary occupations, plant and machine operators and assemblers, craft and related workers, and service and sales workers). The results indicate that overeducation has a unique negative effect on attitudes towards migration to GBA. The findings suggest that social capital theory rather than human capital theory is better able to explain the motivation of Hong Kong’s young people to invest in higher education. This research may help policy makers review the expansion of higher education in Hong Kong and provide valuable policy implications for regional integration between Hong Kong and mainland China. Copyright © 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Declining employment prospects of graduates have been reported in the international literature and in Hong Kong. This casts doubts on the ‘employability’ of graduates of an expanding higher education sector. Yet, published patterns and trends of graduate employment outcomes do not tell us much about the contextualised processes that ‘match’ or ‘mismatch’ graduates’ qualifications with ‘appropriate’ graduate jobs. This paper addresses this research gap through examining lived experience and subjectivities of college/university-to-work transition of 10 graduates of self-financing degree-awarding institutions in Hong Kong, which were derived from a study of 40 local young workers in 2018. Drawing upon ‘positioning’ and ‘processual’ perspectives on ‘employability’, this paper sheds light on the nebulous, mutually constituted nature of the skills demanded by employers in workplace. Also, highlighting the tensions discerned in interview narratives, it elucidates the difficulties for graduates to present their skills as ‘directly’ transferable to the workplace. Graduates’ interpretations of (their) ‘employability’ reveal the differential values attached to (‘technical’ vs. ‘non-technical’) skills, (degree vs. sub-degree) qualifications and (self-financing vs. publicly funded) institutions constructed in the specific context of local higher education development. Implications for further research, assessment of higher education functioning and career services are discussed. Copyright © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

In the last few decades, higher education expansion is becoming increasingly a growing trend in the Asia and Pacific region. With strong conviction to produce more people better equipped with knowledge and skills for coping with the challenges of the globalizing economy, many governments in the Asia and Pacific region have increased higher education enrolments. The massification of higher education has generated significant pressure for graduate employment and eventually affected upward social mobility, with imbalanced supply and demand in terms of higher education graduates. This article sets out against the context highlighted above to critically examine the influence on Asian societies when these higher education enrolments are expanded, as well as its consequences to graduate employment and the impact on social mobility.
[Copyright of Journal of Education and Work is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13639080.2015.1049023]

This article attempts to investigate the relationship between the massification of higher education, labour market and social mobility in contemporary China. Though only a short period of time has elapsed from elite to mass education, China's higher education has been characterised as a wide, pervasive massification process. Similar to other East Asian countries/economies like South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong, the expansion of higher education in China has also generated a great impact on labour markets and social mobility. The massification of higher education has increased college access and in general enhanced the extent of equity and equality in society. Nonetheless, the situation has become far more complex as returns of education have flattened out recently and social mobility has slowed down in general. University students have started to doubt the ability of higher education to improve their competitiveness in the job market. This, in turn, has led to a wide dissatisfaction with higher education development in China, particularly when higher education has experienced highly intensified competition in the context of world-class university movement. Realising that students from different family backgrounds may encounter diverse experiences in graduate employment and opportunity for upward social mobility, this article critically reflects upon how variations in social capital and cultural capital have impacted on graduate employment and social mobility as higher education has massively expanded in China.
[Copyright of Journal of Education and Work is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13639080.2015.1049028]

This article explains why the massification of higher education in Hong Kong has, contrary to the predictions of received wisdom, failed to enhance the upward social mobility of the youth in the city. Building upon recent literature in political science, it argues that massification can take different forms, which in turn determine the effects of massification on various social groups. Through exploring three critical phases in the city’s higher education reform, this article demonstrates how higher education policies have been heavily shaped by the interests of the city’s elites, who, on the one hand, see the expansion of higher education as a solution to such social and economic problems as unemployment and regional integration but, on the other, remain reluctant to increase public spending on the education sector. As a result, higher education has expanded almost exclusively in the private sector. Due to poor planning and implementation, graduates from self-financed programmes are severely disadvantaged in terms of employability, resulting in wage compression and unemployment. The findings of this study shed light on the regressive nature of higher education.
[Copyright © 2015 Routledge.]

As elsewhere, vocational education and training (VET) has a poor image in Hong Kong. To remove the stigma, the Vocational Training Council of Hong Kong embarked on pro-active strategic planning to make it more relevant and cost-effective, exposed long and widely held myths that VET is for dullards which leads only to low-paid and low-status jobs, provided a through-train education system to ensure that VET is no longer an educational cul-de-sac, and sought external accreditation aggressively. Though it is early days, there is strong evidence that these strategies have worked.
[Copyright of Journal of Education and Work is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13639080801957246]

This is a comparative study of the career drivers of accounting students in Singapore, Australia and the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR). The study examines the motivational factors that steer accounting students into choosing accounting as a programme of study in their respective countries. Comparative analyses are performed to examine the importance of each career driver, taking into consideration gender and country/institutional variables. The results indicate significant differences between male and female students with respect to the importance of the following career drivers: search for meaning, security, material rewards and creativity. Significant differences are also found among countries/institutions and the importance of career drivers such as expertise, status, security, affiliation and creativity. The study concludes with a discussion of the implications of the findings for both the profession and academic educators as well as suggestions for future research.
[Copyright of Journal of Education and Work is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13639080801957014]