Why Does a Business Master’s Cost Twice as Much as an Engineering Master’s? A Cost Anatomy of HKUST’s Computer Science and CUHK’s Finance Programmes
Hong Kong’s taught masters are often seen as educational products that combine academic training with professional credentialing. Within the same university, tuition fees for different disciplines can differ by more than twofold, a phenomenon driven not by short-lived market swings but by the long-term interplay among programme cost structures, government funding models and demand-based pricing. Taking the 2025/26 tuition fees for non-local students in the MSc in Computer Science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) and the MSc in Finance at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) as a comparison, the former is listed at HK$186,000 and the latter at HK$425,000—the former amounting to only 43.7% of the latter. According to visa statistics from the Immigration Department (ImmD) for 2023, among non-local students approved to pursue post-secondary programmes in Hong Kong, the share of business and management has long exceeded that of engineering and technology, yet this demand skew alone does not fully explain a price gap of more than 100%. Only by conducting a line-by-line cost reconciliation of the two programmes’ input components can one uncover the fiscal logic behind these price tags.
Programme nature and funding framework form the most fundamental cost divide. Taught master’s programmes in Hong Kong fall into two broad categories: those approved and funded via the University Grants Committee (UGC) and those operated by institutions on a self-financing basis. UGC-funded programmes receive recurrent government grants, allowing academic departments to cover much of the staff salary, computing resources and basic administrative expenses through the block grant, with tuition fees recovering only the marginal cost. Self-financed programmes, on the other hand, must rely entirely on tuition revenue to cover all direct and indirect costs, without any recurrent direct public subvention. HKUST’s MSc in Computer Science, offered by the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, is a UGC-approved taught postgraduate programme, and its fee level must take into account the cost-recovery ratios stipulated by the UGC. CUHK Business School’s MSc in Finance is explicitly designated a self-financed programme, subject to the Education Bureau (EDB) requirement for full cost recovery: tuition income must sustain all operating expenses of the programme. This institutional difference directly dictates the two programmes’ entirely different cost floors and pricing leeway.
Staffing structure is the primary cost driver. Under the UGC-funded model, the core courses of the HKUST computer science master’s are mostly taught by full professors and tenure-track academics, whose teaching