Young University Rankings: HKUST, PolyU and CityU Take the Top Three – The Formula Behind the Rise of Fast Followers
QS’s “Under 50” ranking, which evaluates universities founded less than 50 years ago, annually tracks the academic upstarts that outperform their institutional age. In the 2024 edition, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and the City University of Hong Kong not only occupied the top three places among local young universities, but also appeared together in the global top ten. Behind this cluster lies a combination of institutional agility cultivated through Hong Kong’s post-colonial higher-education reforms, consistent public funding and high knowledge-transfer efficiency. Disaggregating their performance on ranking sub-indicators, research output intensity, industry income conversion and non-local student appeal reveals a logic of ascent that can be scrutinised empirically.
Ranking coordinates: where Hong Kong’s young cohort stands
In the QS Under 50 2024 list, HKUST ranks 2nd globally, PolyU 6th and CityU 8th. When considering only comprehensive universities in Hong Kong that are under 50 years old, these three form the sole top tier, giving rise to the “top three sweep” narrative at the local level. In overall score, HKUST trails the leader Nanyang Technological University by fewer than two points; within a QS framework that still assigns considerable weight to academic reputation, HKUST’s 94.6 employer reputation score helps close the gap. PolyU and CityU each exceed 95 points on both “international faculty ratio” and “international student ratio”, with CityU recording 99.7 on the latter – a vivid illustration of Hong Kong’s magnetic pull on global talent.
Yet local rankings alone do not fully explain the three universities’ competitiveness. Benchmarking against a broader set of international young universities reveals that HKUST has not fallen outside the top two globally since 2015, PolyU has propelled itself from 10th to 6th over the past five years, and CityU has climbed from 9th to 8th. It is worth noting that CityU briefly reached 4th place in the 2021 QS Under 50 table before a soft dip, while its “citations per paper” score has kept rising – suggesting that the underlying research quality has yet to be fully converted into ranking momentum. On per-capita measures, all three surpass the young-university median for “papers per faculty” by over 30 per cent, with HKUST and CityU markedly ahead of other East Asian peers in the same cohort.
An often-overlooked reference point comes from the University Grants Committee’s six-yearly Research Assessment Exercise. The 2020 RAE results show that 46 per cent of HKUST’s research outputs were rated 4-star (“world leading”), compared with 35 per cent at CityU and 31 per cent at PolyU. All three recorded a gain of more than 10 percentage points over the previous RAE cycle, helping to fill the historical accumulation gap that young universities face and feeding the academic reputation indicators used by league tables such as QS.
Industry income: the commercial depth of knowledge transfer
While traditional rankings lean heavily on academic reputation, the “industry income” indicator in the Under 50 table sets fast followers apart. It measures the scale of income that universities derive from business and industry – including commissioned research contracts – and serves as a direct proxy for knowledge-transfer commercialisation. PolyU has long stood out on this indicator. In the 2022/23 financial year, its total knowledge transfer income reached HK$1.38 billion, over 60 per cent of which came from contract research, consultancy services and spin-off ventures. In the same period, CityU recorded an annual industry income of about HK$920 million, and HKUST HK$740 million (figures drawn from each institution’s annual financial report). The combined industry income of the three already exceeds that of some older comprehensive universities, reflecting the dividend of a disciplinary portfolio weighted towards applied engineering and technology.
PolyU’s deep industry embeddedness in textiles and clothing, hotel and tourism management, and civil engineering is evident: the intelligent security screening system co-developed with the Airport Authority and the rail inspection robot developed with the MTR Corporation are direct results of industry-funded initiatives. CityU, leveraging its interdisciplinary platforms in veterinary medicine, life sciences and materials science, has built patent product lines such as veterinary diagnostic reagents and nano-coatings. In 2023, CityU’s income from technology licensing rose 18 per cent year on year, mainly from overseas licensing of energy and environmental technologies. Although HKUST’s absolute industry income figure is lower, the total valuation of its spin-off companies exceeded HK$40 billion in 2023 – with DJI alone demonstrating the long-term returns from its alumni network and start-up ecosystem.
Translated into the ranking’s industry income score, all three universities exceed 90 points, pulling well ahead of traditional research universities. The University of Hong Kong has hovered around 65 on this measure for years, while the Chinese University of Hong Kong stands at roughly 70. The trend suggests that younger universities are more inclined to channel resources into applied research that can connect with industry, rather than pursue pure academic citation counts.
Research output and citation growth: offsetting history with speed
A common handicap for young universities is that their cumulative academic output trails that of century-old institutions. Rankings such as QS therefore raise the relative weight of “citations per paper” and “papers per faculty” in the Under 50 assessment. According to Clarivate’s Essential Science Indicators, HKUST’s citation-per-paper growth rate from 2019 to 2023 was 26 per cent, with materials science exceeding 30 per cent and engineering papers recording a 22 per cent rise. Over the same period, CityU’s engineering and computer science citations grew 28 per cent, while PolyU’s cross-disciplinary engineering and social science fields logged a 34 per cent citation increase. These rates far surpass the 14 per cent global average and also outpace most Asian young universities.
On per-faculty output, data submitted by the universities to the UGC show that in the 2022/23 academic year, CityU’s average journal-paper output per academic/research staff member stood at 3.8, followed by HKUST at 3.5 and PolyU at 3.2 – all above the UGC-funded university average of 2.7. CityU’s rapid expansion in publication volume, achieved after shifting its staff mix towards a research-intensive model, has triggered some debate over teaching-load balance, yet from a ranking perspective the strategy has effectively lifted scores in the short term.
At the same time, Hong Kong’s young universities maintain a higher proportion of internationally co-authored papers than their regional rivals. Scival data for 2022 show that the international co-authorship share was 58 per cent at HKUST, 54 per cent at CityU and 51 per cent at PolyU – all higher than Nanyang Technological University (47 per cent) and South Korea’s POSTECH (38 per cent). High rates of international collaboration directly boost citations per paper, as co-authored papers typically attract 1.7 times the citations of single-author papers. This open network effect, combined with an English-language teaching environment and relatively liberal academic mobility policies, forms a structural advantage that is hard for other young universities to replicate.
Policy supply and fiscal levers: accelerators fuelled by public money
The recurrent funding mechanism administered by the UGC for Hong Kong’s eight publicly funded universities provides young institutions with a highly stable fiscal base. In the 2024/25 financial year, the UGC received HK$22.8 billion in recurrent grants, a 4.2 per cent increase from the previous year, with the share earmarked for research purposes rising gradually to exceed 30 per cent. The three young universities exhibit strong cost-effectiveness in competing for research funds: benchmarked against the 2020 RAE, HKUST’s density of 4-star outputs per Hong Kong dollar of research grant was approximately 17 per cent above the UGC-funded median; CityU’s was 12 per cent higher; and PolyU’s also stood about 8 per cent above the average. This has allowed them to secure continued preferential access to limited research resources.
Beyond recurrent grants, several competitive research funds managed by the Education Bureau provide additional nutrients. Projects from PolyU, CityU and HKUST together captured close to 40 per cent of grants approved under the Innovation and Technology Fund overseen by the Innovation and Technology Commission in 2023/24, reflecting the higher expected commercial conversion of their proposals. In areas such as artificial intelligence, advanced manufacturing and smart cities, the three universities’ application success rates were at least three percentage points above the overall average.
The other end of policy supply is talent. Visa approval data from the Immigration Department offer a sideways measure of young universities’ ability to attract non-local students. In 2023, around 52,000 “study entry” visas were approved, of which mainland Chinese applicants accounted for 38,000 – a 46 per cent increase from 26,000 in 2019, before the pandemic. University-level statistics show that the non-local student share of total enrolment has surpassed 20 per cent at HKUST, CityU and PolyU, reaching 31 per cent at HKUST. Immigration Department figures also reveal that over 9,200 “Immigration Arrangements for Non-local Graduates” (IANG) visas were granted in 2023, a year-on-year increase of 31 per cent, with the majority of holders having graduated from these three young universities. This closed loop of “entry–study–employment” not only offsets the shortfall in local student numbers caused by declining birth rates, but also continuously supplies talent to knowledge-intensive industries.
Layered assessment: decoding the three universities’ distinct genetic profiles
When the three young universities are placed on a common set of axes, their respective rise strategies clearly diverge.
HKUST wins on traditional academic reputation and international faculty ratio. In the 2024 QS Under 50 indicators, HKUST’s academic reputation score of 98.3 and employer reputation score of 94.6 are the highest among the three, and its proportion of international staff has remained above 85 per cent – the highest among Hong Kong’s eight UGC-funded institutions. Its formula can be summarised as “using top faculty to catalyse research intensity”: from its founding, the university modelled itself on US-style research universities, driving paper output through a tenure-track professoriate and then converting research influence into ranking gains.
PolyU’s core weapon is industry income and the professional orientation of its programmes. It offers more than 160 taught postgraduate programmes, nearly half of whose places are reserved for part-time in-service learners, creating a cash-flow loop with industry. In a supplementary QS employer-partnership survey, PolyU has ranked first among Hong Kong institutions for five consecutive years, reinforcing its positioning as an “industry-linked” university.
CityU’s path leans heavily on publication volume and citation acceleration. Between 2021 and 2024, its academic citation score in the QS overall ranking jumped from 79.1 to 87.9, the steepest rise among Hong Kong’s eight universities. In recent years, CityU has recruited a group of highly cited scholars at premium salaries and established new units such as the School of Data Science and the School of Energy and Environment, directly expanding its publication pool. This “star-recruitment blitz” strategy has allowed CityU to close the citation score gap with HKUST within a short period.
In terms of student enrolment, the three follow a gradient: in 2023/24, CityU had approximately 22,000 full-time students, PolyU around 25,000, and HKUST about 16,000. HKUST’s smaller scale makes it easier to maintain an elite student–staff ratio, while PolyU and CityU’s larger intakes dilute per-capita resources but generate more places and tuition income. This structural choice leaves clear traces in the gains and losses on individual ranking indicators.
Landing point: testing non-local student pull in the post-pandemic era
Immigration data make the cross-border appeal of young universities quantifiable. In 2023, the number of non-local students at HKUST from countries along the Belt and Road rose 62 per cent compared with 2021, reflecting the effectiveness of its recruitment outreach in the Middle East, Central Asia and Southeast Asia. In the same year, CityU recorded a 35 per cent year-on-year increase in undergraduate applications from the mainland, with the final intake growing 21 per cent, narrowing the application-to-admission ratio further to 6.4:1. At PolyU, the number of mainland taught-postgraduate students surpassed 6,000 for the first time, becoming the single largest source of non-local student growth at the university.
Non-local tuition fees at these three young universities are generally more than three times the local rate, yet demand continues to outstrip supply. In the 2024/25 academic year, HKUST’s undergraduate non-local tuition stood at HK$175,000, while CityU and PolyU charged around HK$160,000. The resulting supplementary income feeds into scholarship pools and research infrastructure, creating another form of self-sustaining capacity. In 2023/24, CityU distributed HK$210 million in non-local scholarships, PolyU HK$170 million and HKUST HK$140 million – each roughly double the amount five years ago. Most of these funds come from tuition revenue surpluses and endowment returns, allowing the universities to attract overseas talent without relying entirely on government grants.
Risks and ceilings: where the ceiling lies for young universities
Notwithstanding their steep ranking trajectories, Hong Kong’s three young universities face foreseeable bottlenecks. The first is that their alumni networks are still relatively thin, and the scale of their endowments lags far behind HKU and CUHK. As of 2023, HKUST’s endowment totalled around HK$12 billion, PolyU’s HK$9.5 billion and CityU’s HK$7.5 billion, compared with HK$28 billion at the University of Hong Kong and HK$21 billion at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. This means that for long-cycle capital expenditure – such as campus expansion and major research facilities – the young universities still need to depend on government injections.
The second is the impending exit from the “young university” category once they turn 50. PolyU and CityU were formally granted university status in 1994, and HKUST in 1991. They now have only one to three years left before they age out of the QS Under 50 ranking. Once removed from that cohort, they will compete directly with century-old global names under a single scoring framework, where their advantages in industry income and per-faculty output may be diluted. CityU currently sits at 70th in the QS World University Rankings (main table), PolyU at 65th and HKUST at 60th; a further breakthrough into the top 50 will require sustained investment in “slow variables” like academic and employer reputation.
The third is the emigration wave and loss of academic staff. Data from the Census and Statistics Department show that between 2020 and 2023, local higher education institutions lost more than 200 academic staff at the rank of full professor or above, a sizeable proportion heading to the United Kingdom, Canada and Singapore. Although universities have filled vacancies through external recruitment, the loss of tacit knowledge and the cost of rebuilding teams cannot be ignored, and this places pressure on research continuity.