Universities’ global appeal flourishes

Hong Kong’s universities are internationally renowned for their excellence in many different fields, attracting students from all around the world to study in the city.

Unique advantages: Hannah Yu says she chose to study in Hong Kong partly because the city is one of the few common law jurisdictions in Asia.

Hannah Yu is among them. Hailing from Zhejiang, she is an undergraduate student in City University’s School of Law. She describes the university as having an international atmosphere, with various courses being taught by visiting foreign scholars.

“Hong Kong is the bridge between the east and west,” she said. “Here we can have more chance to interact with people with diverse backgrounds. And also, Hong Kong is one of the few common law jurisdictions in Asia.”

The university also provides a number of exchange programmes, with Hannah having been on short-term exchange visits to Oxford University in the UK and another university in Sweden.

“I think this experience is what Hong Kong gives me,” she said.

Universities in Hong Kong encourage exchange learning by developing exchange programmes and offering financial assistance to participating students. As of the end of November last year, universities funded by the University Grants Committee (UGC) had signed more than 2,600 student exchange agreements with institutions around the world.

Highly internationalised: Ivelina Karaatanasova from Bulgaria says City University’s diverse culture allows students to interact with people from different backgrounds and stimulates creativity.

Cultural diversity

City University has been ranked as the world’s most international university by the British magazine Times Higher Education for two consecutive years, and its many non-local students help to create a richly multicultural environment.

Ivelina Karaatanasova from Bulgaria is an undergraduate student at the university’s School of Creative Media. She explained that she chose to study in Hong Kong because she wanted to explore creative environments outside of Europe.

Owing to the university’s highly internationalised environment, she has met people from all kinds of backgrounds, allowing her to think innovatively and understand diverse perspectives.

She added that she enjoys Hong Kong’s vibrant lifestyle and hopes to stay in the city after graduation if she can find an opportunity to develop her career here.

Abundant opportunities: Kevin Frans Periatna from Indonesia says Hong Kong offers diversified opportunities for graduates, adding that he hopes to start his own business in the city in the future.

Abundant opportunities

Kevin Frans Periatna from Indonesia agrees that Hong Kong boasts unique advantages and offers a diverse range of opportunities for graduates.

An undergraduate in City University’s College of Business, he was inspired to step out of his comfort zone and come to Hong Kong by the example of his elder brother, a City University graduate.

He highlighted that Hong Kong provides diversified options for graduate career paths, adding that the Government offers extensive support for startups, backed by a flourishing ecosystem in the city. Kevin plans to stay in Hong Kong after graduating to develop his career or even start his own business.

He also emphasised the part cultural diversity plays in ensuring the university’s success.

“There will not be innovation if there are no different opinions,” he said. “By having different people from different cultures, it could make the university become one of the best universities.”

Bigger picture: University Grants Committee Secretariat Secretary-General Prof James Tang believes that attracting outstanding students is important to Hong Kong’s overall development.

Talent acquisition

To further develop Hong Kong into an international education hub for post-secondary education, the Government doubled the enrolment ceiling for non-local students of government-funded post-secondary institutions to 40% from the current academic year.

UGC Secretariat Secretary-General Prof James Tang said that having more foreign students studying in Hong Kong is beneficial to the city.

“On the one hand, it will attract talent to Hong Kong,” he said. “On the other hand, it helps local students in appreciating and understanding diverse cultures.”

The number of non-local students has gradually increased over the past five years. In the current academic year, the number of such students enrolling in UGC-funded programmes reached about 26,600, adding to growing demand for student accommodation.

The Government set up the Hostel Development Fund in 2018 to support the construction of student hostels by UGC-funded universities. With the completion of various hostel projects coming to fruition, it is expected that the total capacity of the city’s student accommodation will increase to around 50,000.

BOSTON (AP) — The man identified as the shooter who killed two Brown University students and an MIT professor planned the attack for years and left behind videos in which he confessed to the murders but gave no motive, according to information released Tuesday by the U.S. Department of Justice.

Claudio Neves Valente, 48, a former Brown student and Portuguese national, was found dead in a New Hampshire storage facility after he killed two students and wounded nine others in an engineering building on Dec. 13. Two days later he killed MIT professor Nuno F.G. Loureiro in his home in the Boston suburb of Brookline.

Justice Department officials said Tuesday that during the search of the storage facility where Neves Valente’s body was found on Dec. 18, the FBI recovered an electronic device containing a series of short videos made by Neves Valente after the shootings.

In the recordings, the shooter admitted in Portuguese that he had been working out details for at least six semesters. He did not give a motive for targeting Brown or the professor, with whom he attended school in Portugal decades ago.

In an English-translated transcript provided by the Justice Department, Neves Valente said he felt he had nothing to apologize for. He also complained in the videos about injuring his eye in the shootings.

“I’m not going to apologize because during my lifetime no one sincerely apologized to me,” he said.

He explicitly addressed baseless claims spread by conservative influencer Laura Loomer after the attack that the Brown shooter had spoken in Arabic, saying something like “Allahu akbar” upon entering the auditorium.

Neves Valente said he did not speak a word of Arabic or intend to make any kind of statement. If he said anything, he “must have made an exclamation like, ‘Oh no!’ or something like that,” to express disappointment that the auditorium appeared to be empty when he entered, he said. Students were hiding under desks, but Neves Valente thought they’d already escaped through an emergency exit.

“I never wanted to do it in an auditorium. I wanted to do it in a regular room,” he said. “I had plenty of opportunities. Especially this semester, I had plenty of opportunities, but I always chickened out.”

He insisted he was not mentally ill. He said he did not want to be famous and the video was not a manifesto.

Neves Valente said his “only objective was to leave more or less” on his “own terms” and to ensure he “wouldn’t be the one who ended up suffering the most from all this.”

“No, that cannot happen. So if you don’t like it, tough luck,” he said. Neves Valente called his execution of the murders “a little incompetent.”

“But at least something was done,” he said.

Neves Valente wounded nine people and killed two students: Sophomore Ella Cook, 19, and 18-year-old freshman MukhammadAziz Umurzokov.

Two days later, authorities say, Neves Valente fatally shot Loureiro. Valente and Loureiro attended the same academic program at a university in Portugal between 1995 and 2000. Loureiro graduated from the physics program at Instituto Superior Técnico, that country's premier engineering school, in 2000, according to his MIT faculty page. The same year Neves Valente was let go from a position at the Lisbon university, according to an archive of a termination notice from the school’s then-president in February 2000.

In the recording he said he had the storage space where his body was found for about three years.

Brown University said in a statement Tuesday that “the gravity of this tragedy continues to weigh heavily on the full Brown University community" and that they continue to mourn the deaths of the two students and pray for the full recovery of those who were injured.

Neves Valente mentioned his confrontation with a witness at Brown that ultimately led to his identification days later.

According to police, the witness had several encounters with Neves Valente before the attack. As police posted images of the person of interest, the witness began posting on the social media forum Reddit that he recognized the person and theorized that police should look into “possibly a rental” gray Nissan. Reddit users urged him to inform the FBI, and the witness said he did.

Until that point, the police affidavit says, officials had not connected a vehicle to the possible shooter.

“I actually was confronted,” Neves Valente said about the Brown shooting, adding that the witness saw his license plate.

“I honestly never thought it would take them so long to find me,” he said.

He said he had no hatred or love for the United States, where he first arrived around 25 years ago to study physics at Brown's graduate program before leaving in the spring of 2001.

Neves Valente studied at Brown on a student visa. He eventually obtained legal permanent residence in September 2017. His last known residence was in Miami.

“It’s the same thing with Portugal, and most of the places where I have been,” he said, adding later that “I’ve been here without caring for a very long time now.”

FILE - People hold candles during a vigil in Providence, R.I., for those injured or killed in the previous day's shooting on the campus of Brown University, Sunday, Dec. 14, 2025. (AP Photo/Steven Senne, File)

A Brown University student walks past a church on the Providence, RI, campus, Thursday, Dec. 18, 2025. (AP Photo/ Mark Stockwell)

FILE - Photos of Brown University shooting victims MukhammadAziz Umurzokov, left, and Ella Cook, lay on a makeshift memorial outside the Engineering Research Center, Dec. 16, 2025, in Providence, R.I. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty, File)