Arts and Humanities Rankings: HKU and CUHK Drift Lower – Is Hong Kong’s Cultural Lineage Fading?
Since 2011, when QS World University Rankings first separated Arts and Humanities as an independent broad subject area, the University of Hong Kong’s ranking in this field has functioned as a barometer for the East Asian humanities ecosystem. QS subject data from 2015 to 2024 show that HKU has slipped from a peak of 13th to 34th in 2024, shedding more than 20 places over the period. Over the same span, the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) drifted from around 35th to the edge of 60th. This decade-long pattern—not a sudden collapse but a persistent, gentle decline—has raised a deeper question: is Hong Kong’s cultural and intellectual lineage quietly fading?
1. 2015–2018: Hesitation at the End of a Golden Era
When QS published its first broad-subject Arts and Humanities ranking in 2015, Harvard, Oxford and Cambridge took the top three spots. HKU placed 13th with an overall score of 87.4, joining the University of Tokyo (12th) and the National University of Singapore (15th) in the first tier of Asian humanities institutions. At that time, HKU’s Faculty of Arts—home to art history, linguistics, comparative literature and music—enjoyed steady citation rates and strong academic reputation scores. CUHK, drawing on its strengths in Chinese language and literature, philosophy and anthropology, ranked 35th, and its “International Faculty Ratio” indicator reached 38%, higher than Oxford’s 32%, reflecting the international competitiveness of its humanities programmes. According to the Immigration Department (ImmD) annual report, the number of employment visas approved under the General Employment Policy for university teaching and research posts in humanities fields in the 2015/16 financial year was 7% higher than the average of the previous three years, confirming that Hong Kong was still on a positive trajectory in recruiting international talent for the humanities.
Early signs of strain, however, appeared when 2016 data were released. That year HKU fell to 18th and CUHK edged down to 40th. The change was driven less by a collapse in academic reputation than by a drag from “citations per paper”—an objective metric. Based on Scopus subject classification, HKU’s citations per paper in Arts and Humanities dropped from 3.6 in 2014–15 to 3.2 in 2016–17; CUHK’s fell from 3.9 to 3.4 over the same period. At the same time, the growth rate of citations for China- or Hong Kong-contextualised research published in top international humanities journals was slowing, while European and North American scholars continued to occupy the centre of citation networks. The University Grants Committee (UGC)’s preliminary analysis of the 2016 Research Assessment Exercise further noted that among more than 1,200 research outputs submitted in the humanities and arts panel, only 23% were rated “world-leading” (four-star), compared with 31% in engineering and 35% in natural sciences. This structural gap subsequently became one reference point for policy-makers adjusting funding criteria.
Minor fluctuations in international faculty composition surfaced in the following year’s data. In 2017, the proportion of international academic staff (non-permanent residents holding a non-local PhD) in HKU’s Faculty of Arts stood at 41%, while CUHK’s fell back to 36%. ImmD figures showed that the number of visas approved under the General Employment Policy for humanities teaching and research in that year dropped by about 4% year-on-year. Although the number itself was modest, it contrasted with recruitment growth in science and engineering faculties, whose visa approvals rose by 6% and 9% respectively in 2017. The Education Bureau (EDB) stated in a submission to the Legislative Council that the hiring of university faculty was within the autonomous remit of individual institutions and that the government would not intervene directly, yet a “STEM-first” policy orientation was already perceptible.
2. 2019–2021: Social Shocks and Diverging Citation Trajectories
The social turbulence Hong Kong experienced in 2019 and 2020 produced a measurable impact on international mobility in higher education. ImmD visa statistics for 2019 show that the number of intellectuals arriving under the Quality Migrant Admission Scheme and the General Employment Policy for culture, arts and education work dropped by 19% compared with the previous year. Internal university data were more direct: the non-local academic staff departure rate in HKU’s Faculty of Arts reached 9.2% that year, the highest in eight years. CUHK’s Faculty of Arts saw its proportion of international academic staff fall from 39% in 2018 to 33% in 2020, with the Department of Linguistics and Translation hit especially hard—six long-serving expatriate academics left within a single year as their contracts expired, and they were not replaced in equal numbers. CUHK’s Senate meeting minutes acknowledged that “recruiting internationally competitive humanities scholars under current circumstances requires higher-than-usual salary and relocation costs,” and those rising costs further dampened hiring intentions.
Rankings entered a phase of accelerated dilution during this period. On the 2020 QS Arts and Humanities list, HKU remained at 27th, seemingly holding the top-30 threshold, but its H-index score had fallen by about four percentage points since 2018, signalling that high-impact publications were no longer being produced at the previous density. CUHK slipped to 45th. In 2021, HKU edged further toward the 27th-boundary and CUHK’s 50th place was its lowest since 2015. A closer look at QS score components shows that the decline in the Academic Reputation survey was relatively mild—down 0.8% year-on-year for HKU and 1.1% for CUHK—but citations per paper (covering the 2016–2020 window) fell more sharply: HKU’s figure dropped to 2.8 and CUHK’s to 2.9, both below the global average of 3.3 for top-50 arts and humanities faculties. The UGC’s Research Assessment Exercise 2020, which juxtaposed the 2014 and 2020 panels, found that the combined proportion of four-star and three-star outputs in the humanities and arts panel fell from 74% to 69%, while the equivalent in engineering rose from 79% to 82%. One sentence in the report was frequently cited in policy circles: “The tension between the basic research output model of the humanities and an international evaluation system centred on citation metrics is deepening, and this tension is particularly pronounced in a Chinese-language context.”
The distribution of government research funding also tilted sharply towards science and technology during this phase, adding another layer of practical pressure. According to the Joint Distribution of Research Funding 2019–2022 published by the Innovation and Technology Commission and the UGC, the humanities and social sciences’ share of the General Research Fund and the Areas of Excellence Scheme fell to about 10.7%, down from 14.2% in 2014–2017, while the share for engineering and biomedical disciplines expanded from 48% to 55%. Responding to a Legislative Council question in 2021, the Secretary for Education stated bluntly, “In overall fiscal planning, giving priority to disciplines related to economic transformation and innovation and technology development is a strategic choice aligned with Hong Kong’s long-term interests.” That formulation was quickly read by the education sector as a signal that the humanities had been placed in an “auxiliary” category, destined to remain on the defensive in resource competition for the foreseeable future.
3. 2022–2024: Inertial Drift in a Quieter Period
From 2022, as the world gradually emerged from pandemic restrictions, Hong Kong’s higher education sector also attempted to reset its internationalisation trajectory, but the recovery rate for the humanities was noticeably slower than in other fields. QS rankings showed HKU at 30th and CUHK at 53rd in 2022; HKU 31st and CUHK 57th in 2023; and by 2024 HKU had fallen to 34th and CUHK to 60th. In just three years HKU lost another three places and CUHK seven. Even allowing for the convergence of scores among lower-ranked institutions, the “gentle decline” clearly remained a stubborn trend.
Among the structural factors behind this latest slide, the continued drop in the proportion of international academic staff is difficult to ignore. In the 2023/24 academic year, HKU’s Faculty of Arts reported that 35% of its teaching staff were non-local, down from 41% in 2016; CUHK’s Faculty of Arts registered a figure of 29% in 2023, already below the global average of about 34% for top-100 humanities faculties. While City University of Hong Kong and Hong Kong Polytechnic University have relatively stable creative media and design departments, the overall volume of their humanities is not enough to alter the wider ecology. According to the Immigration Department Statistics for 2023, the number of entry permits issued under the General Employment Policy specifically for humanities and arts academic posts at tertiary institutions was only 109, the lowest in a decade, and far below the 179 recorded in 2015. Even allowing for academics who may have arrived through other talent schemes, immigration data clearly point to a weakening inflow.
The erosion of citation impact indicators has yet to be contained. Based on Elsevier SciVal data for the 2019–2022 window, the field-weighted citation impact (FWCI) in Arts and Humanities for the eight UGC-funded universities stood at 1.12 for HKU and 1.02 for CUHK—only marginally above the global benchmark of 1.00—compared with 1.78 for University College London and 1.35 for the National University of Singapore. It is especially notable that the proportion of highly cited papers (top 10%) in traditional humanities disciplines such as literature, history and philosophy shrank from 11.3% in 2019 to 9.6% in 2023 at HKU, and from 10.8% to 8.9% at CUHK. These percentage-point shifts are small, but in an increasingly refined global humanities competition they often reflect a “citation gap” left behind as younger scholars migrate to institutions that offer stronger publication advantages.
The ongoing redistribution of government education funding has deepened the resource anxiety felt in the humanities. The Education Bureau’s Overview of Education Statistics 2023 notes that in the 2022/23 financial year, the share of UGC recurrent grants allocated to arts and humanities programmes (bachelor’s degree and sub-degree) was about 13.9%, down more than two percentage points from 16.2% five years earlier, while the share for engineering and technology programmes rose from 26.5% to 31.4%. Correspondingly, data from the Hong Kong Examinations and Assessment Authority (HKEAA) on the Diploma of Secondary Education (DSE) reflect subtle changes at the admissions end: the median best-five-subject scores for HKU’s core arts programmes (such as the Bachelor of Arts) drifted downwards over the past five years, from 27 points in 2019 to 25 points in 2023, while the equivalent at CUHK slipped from 26 to 24 points. These marginal score movements do not necessarily signal a substantive decline in student quality, but they do suggest that fewer top scorers are choosing the humanities as their first-preference destination.
4. Beyond the Rankings: Is Hong Kong’s Cultural Lineage Fading?
“Cultural lineage” is not a concept that can be directly measured by any league table, yet it implies a city’s cumulative depth in cultural transmission, humanistic reflection and creative expression. The downward drift of Hong Kong’s humanities rankings acts as a tangible symptom of a broader enquiry, and behind that symptom lie three interwoven forces.
First, the paradigm shift in knowledge production and evaluation systematically undervalues Chinese-language-context research in quantitative indicators dominated by English. The director of the MA programme in Comparative and Public History at CUHK once noted in a journal article that the visibility of Chinese-language humanities texts in internationally indexed journals is inherently limited; when citation rates and impact factors are treated as core evaluative criteria, research centred on Chinese literature, Chinese philosophy and Hong Kong’s local culture inevitably hits an “impact ceiling.” In 2023, a group of linguists from HKU who studied tonal evolution in Cantonese published a paper in the top international journal Language. Although the study garnered scholarly attention, its citation count was far lower than that of a contemporaneous neurolinguistic paper using machine learning and fMRI—an illustration that the evaluation mechanism’s preference for quantitative methodology has already begun to sway the internal allocation of resources within disciplines.
Second, the loss of international faculty is not merely a question of entry and exit statistics; it represents a fracture in the sustained construction of a scholarly community. Humanities disciplines rely on mentoring relationships, public deliberation and locally grounded experience. When a senior professor of comparative literature or an urban historian leaves, what is lost is often a small symposium, a regular reading group and a cross-institutional network. An internal survey by the Education University of Hong Kong in 2022 revealed that international collaborative publications in traditional humanities fields had fallen by about 14% over the previous five years, and the shrinking of international cooperation networks in turn reduced the international visibility and citation rates of the publications, creating a negative feedback loop.
Third, selective investment by the government and society has increasingly pushed the humanities into a residual, safety-net position. In the 2024 Budget, the government continued to tilt resources toward “life and health technology” and “artificial intelligence and data science,” while the allocation for the humanities and social sciences was described in only a token “steady” narrative without any real increase. In secondary-school career guidance settings, the “employment prospects” narrative attached to the humanities is frequently subordinated to the grand narrative of technology subjects, indirectly affecting DSE high-achievers’ preference for arts faculties.
A purely pessimistic account, of course, also has its blind spots. In 2023, HKU’s Department of Art History received a large donation from a private foundation to establish a laboratory for Buddhist art collections and digital humanities; CUHK’s Universities Service Centre for China Studies remains a globally important archive for Sinologists, and its digitised Republican-period newspapers project attracted over a million visits from more than forty countries in 2022–23. Hong Kong Polytechnic University’s design programmes continue to rank among the world’s top 20 in the QS Art and Design subject area, and City University’s School of Creative Media remains active at the intersection of media art and human-computer interaction. Such bright spots show that a fragmentary statistical decline can coexist with pockets of sustained creativity; cultural lineage may not be decaying in a single linear dimension but may instead be undergoing a “morphological shift.”
FAQ
1. Does the decline in HKU’s QS Arts and Humanities ranking mean its Faculty of Arts has suffered a significant drop in academic quality?
The decline reflects structural pressures in the evaluation mechanism more than a cliff-edge fall in academic standards. In the QS Arts and Humanities ranking, academic reputation and employer reputation carry weights of 40% and 20% respectively, with citations per paper at 20% and the H-index at 20%. HKU’s Arts Faculty continues to score well in the Academic Reputation survey; it is mainly the citation and internationalisation metrics that have weakened. Academic quality should be assessed over a longer time horizon, and short-term fluctuations of a few ranking places should not be equated with a collapse of overall scholarly calibre.
2. Do falling DSE admission scores mean the student quality of Hong Kong’s arts faculties is deteriorating?
A slight dip in the median best-five-subject DSE score is not a direct proxy for weakening student ability. Score fluctuations are affected by the number of candidates, subtle adjustments in marking standards and the flow of top scorers toward other fields. Moreover, arts faculties evaluate language proficiency, critical thinking and cultural sensitivity—qualities not fully captured by examination results. Nonetheless, a persistent downward drift in score medians does signal longer-term challenges in interest stimulation and social recognition for the humanities.
3. Has the government’s heavy allocation of research funding toward STEM disciplines caused real harm to humanities research?
The shift in funding structure has had a tangible impact. Humanities disciplines face constraints in basic research grants, postdoctoral quotas and large-equipment subsidies, which reduce researchers’ willingness to choose Hong Kong as a research base, lengthen the time junior scholars must wait for permanent academic posts, and gradually suppress academic output. Some projects have turned to private foundations and charitable donations for supplementary funding, but the scale of such supplements cannot fully bridge the gap left by public funding.
4. Why has the proportion of international faculty in the humanities at CUHK and HKU continued to decline?
Multiple factors are at work. Changes in the social environment, immigration policies, the cost of living and the erosion of Hong Kong’s relative advantage in salary and benefits within global competition have all dampened overseas scholars’ willingness to come. At the same time, local academic posts often require Chinese-language teaching and research capabilities, which narrows the pool of candidates for international recruitment. Additionally, budget tightening across several universities means arts faculties are more inclined to maintain existing teaching services with leaner staffing, making large-scale global searches difficult to sustain as a norm.
5. What are the employment prospects for humanities graduates in Hong Kong?
Humanities graduates have traditionally entered a dispersed range of fields, including education, publishing, media, cultural management, public services and corporate training. Hong Kong’s cultural industry and museum complex continue to expand, generating steady demand for graduates with curatorial, editorial and cross-cultural communication skills. However, when compared by median starting salary or short-term career clarity, a gap between humanities graduates and those from engineering, finance and IT does exist, and this gap has widened somewhat in recent years.
On the global higher education map, several cities once known for their humanities traditions are experiencing similar “gentle declines”—while Oxford and Cambridge still sit at the top, the citation impact of their humanities work has also been diluted by North American and Asian competitors over the past decade; Berlin and Paris are wrestling with localisation policies and budget cuts. Hong Kong is not an isolated case, but its peculiarity is that, as a deeply globalised city highly dependent on external academic circulation, the risk to its cultural lineage becomes more systemic when its internal nourishing mechanisms loosen. Beneath the ebb and flow of ranking numbers, what may be more worth tracking is whether the humanities can find new forms of justification in a changing social narrative, rather than merely waiting for a restoration of yesterday’s prestige.