Introduction and Comparative Framework
Hong Kong’s media-focused higher education has long presented an empirical puzzle worth revisiting: the School of Communication at Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU) and the School of Journalism and Communication at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) construct two markedly different cost structures in terms of curriculum orientation, internship resource deployment, and graduate labour-market outcomes. In other words, the two schools represent a classic tension between a vocational immersion model and a liberal-arts-inflected academic track. According to the University Grants Committee’s (UGC) 2022/23 graduate employment survey, the full-time employment rate for bachelor’s degree holders in “journalism and communication” across the eight UGC-funded institutions stood at 92.7%, a figure that sets an industry baseline for the comparison that follows. This article examines the differentiated impact the two schools have on students’ financial investment and career returns, drawing on public regulatory data and institutional annual reports across three dimensions: academic curriculum, internship ecosystems, and employment earnings.
Curriculum Structure and Training Costs
Undergraduate programme configuration and mandatory practical training
HKBU’s School of Communication offers three major streams—Journalism and Digital Media, Public Relations and Advertising, and Film, Television and New Media. Within the Journalism and Digital Media major, students are required to complete at least 96 credits over four years, with roughly one-third of the coursework classified as hands-on “laboratory/workshop” modules. Compulsory courses include visual journalism, data journalism, and radio production, along with a minimum of 120 hours of studio shifts each semester. CUHK’s School of Journalism and Communication adopts a more flexible structure: students spend their first two years on core subjects such as journalism theory, media law and regulation, and communication research methods, only entering specialist tracks—news reporting and editing, advertising creative, or broadcast production—in the third year. The minimum graduation requirement is 123 credits, but more than half are filled by university general education, college courses, and free electives. Both schools’ undergraduate programmes are UGC-funded and charged the same tuition fee of HK$42,100 in the 2023/24 academic year. However, HKBU students who take film and television production electives must pay an additional equipment maintenance and consumables fee of approximately HK$2,200–3,500 per year, an item listed on the School’s fee schedule. CUHK runs a “Journalism Practice Fund” that subsidises travel and equipment rental costs for students enrolled in feature reporting courses, with a maximum annual allowance of HK$5,000 per student, though students need to apply proactively. These institutional differences translate directly into the recurring, four-year expenses families must budget for, and thus represent a quantifiable cost of programme ownership.
Faculty configuration and the translation of hardware investment
In terms of physical infrastructure, HKBU’s School of Communication is housed in the Communication and Visual Arts Building on the Kowloon Tong campus, which contains a converged news centre, a virtual reality studio, colour-grading suites, and other facilities. The total value of equipment grew from HK$120 million in 2019/20 to HK$160 million in 2023/24, reflecting sustained upgrades to digital production platforms. CUHK’s School of Journalism and Communication is located in the Mong Man Wai Building on the Sha Tin campus, offering a broadcast studio, media laboratories, and interdisciplinary research centres, though some production equipment is shared with the university’s Shun Hing Institute of Advanced Engineering. The academic staff profile also differs: in the 2023/24 academic year HKBU School of Communication employed 58 full-time faculty members, about 40% of whom had prior media industry experience; CUHK School of Journalism and Communication had 37 full-time faculty in the same period, predominantly holding doctoral degrees in communication, with a lower proportion of industry experience than HKBU. If educational output is treated as an investment in human capital, the practical networks of a teaching team directly affect the marginal cost at which students secure internship opportunities—an issue expanded upon in the next section.
Internship Resource Networks
HKBU’s industry-embedded model
Starting from the 2018/19 academic year, HKBU School of Communication made “Summer Professional Internship” a graduation requirement worth 6 credits for Journalism and Digital Media and Public Relations and Advertising majors. Students must complete a full-time internship of at least eight weeks during the summer of their third year. According to data released by the School, more than 230 internship places were provided by partner organisations in 2022/23, spanning over 120 media and PR-advertising firms including TVB, Hong Kong Cable Television, Now TV, South China Morning Post, HK01, Initium Media, Ogilvy, and Edelman. For overseas placements, the School holds short-term internship agreements with organisations such as the BBC and CNN, sending no more than 15 high-performing students to the UK or US each year. Around 70% of airfare and accommodation costs are covered by the School’s International Experience Fund and related alumni donations, while students cover living expenses of approximately HK$12,000 on their own. In essence, these arrangements internalise a portion of vocational training costs within the School’s operating budget, reducing the hidden expense of students having to hunt for internships themselves. In financial terms, HKBU’s internship infrastructure functions like a placement guarantee that reduces friction costs for students.
CUHK’s diverse internship channels
CUHK School of Journalism and Communication does not mandate an internship as a graduation requirement, but the School’s annual surveys show that the internship participation rate among third-year and above undergraduates averaged 71% from 2021/22 through 2023/24. The School maintains internship partnerships with over 80 local organisations, including Ming Pao, Sing Tao Daily, Hong Kong Economic Times, RTHK, Phoenix TV’s Hong Kong channel, and Commercial Radio. In addition, the School takes part in the “University Journalism Internship Programme,” sending 20–30 students each summer to Phoenix TV’s Shenzhen headquarters or Initium Media’s Taipei editorial centre; accommodation and travel are half-subsidised by the organisers, with students bearing about HK$8,000–15,000 themselves. Another distinctive feature of CUHK is the encouragement it gives students to use the university’s international exchange programme to study at communication schools in Europe, the Americas, or Asia. In 2022/23, 35 undergraduates went on exchange to institutions such as the University of California, Berkeley and the London School of Economics and Political Science, with the School providing scholarships ranging from HK$5,000 to HK$15,000 per student. Overall exchange costs are still notably higher than those for local internships. Comparing the two internship ecosystems, HKBU shortens the classroom-to-newsroom transition with high-coverage local training, while CUHK offers more diverse international mobility options—but at greater expense to families. The core difference between the two schools’ internship resources lies in “opportunity density” and the “self-pay ratio.”
Media Job Market and Salary Trends
Overall employment rate and industry absorption
According to UGC data for the 2022/23 academic year, 92.7% of bachelor’s degree holders in “journalism and communication” across the eight UGC-funded institutions were in full-time employment, momentarily exceeding the overall university average. Zooming into each school’s internal surveys, HKBU School of Communication’s 2023 graduate questionnaire indicates that 65.3% chose media, advertising, or public relations roles, with a further 18% entering related fields such as marketing and digital marketing. CUHK School of Journalism and Communication’s 2022 graduate survey (reported in 2023) found that 52.1% took up core media roles in news, broadcasting, publishing, and digital media, 22.7% entered PR and advertising, and the remainder were spread across government, education, and NGOs. In other words, HKBU graduates show a roughly thirteen-percentage-point higher propensity to go directly into media work, a trend linked to the compulsory internship system and the density of industry ties. CUHK journalism graduates, by contrast, display a more dispersed pattern that mirrors the school’s broad-based curriculum.
The sector-wide benchmark for entry-level salaries can be found in the Census and Statistics Department’s 2023 Annual Report on Earnings and Hours of Work, which lists the median monthly earnings of employees aged 25–34 in the “publishing, broadcasting, film and video” industry.