Staff turnover at Hong Kong’s largest self-financing university hit 20 per cent at its peak amid a wave of emigration, its head revealed on Thursday, warning the problem it and other tertiary institutions faced should be addressed before it became a crisis.

Professor Paul Lam Kwan-sing, president of Hong Kong Metropolitan University which has 393 staff members, said its nursing school was the hardest hit.

He said the city’s emigration wave had wrecked his plans to build a strong teaching team to boost the university’s reputation after he took office last year.

Professor Paul Lam, president of Hong Kong Metropolitan University.

“My original intention was to increase manpower, not to hire people to fill vacancies. Why did people leave? There are many reasons and emigration is one of the reasons,” he said.

“If staff from the Hospital Authority resign, the authority will hire our teachers, the situation is like musical chairs.”

He noted the university was required to keep a certain teacher-to-student ratio in its nursing programmes. Lam added that the high turnover rate of its nursing school was a problem shared by other universities.

“Other [institutions] do not have enough [teaching staff] too, they compete with each other for manpower, and staff wages keep increasing,” he said, describing the problem as a challenge that needed to be addressed. “So we need to train more talent. It is not yet a crisis, and we will not let it turn into a crisis.”

Three publicly funded institutions offer nursing degree programmes – the University of Hong Kong, Chinese University and Polytechnic University.

Lam also said emigration had affected the university’s enrolment, with more students turning down offers of places. The university currently has more than 11,000 full-time students and over 8,000 part-time ones spread over three campuses and two learning centres.

He said his institution, which changed its name from the Open University of Hong Kong last year, was open to relaxing its admission criteria by enrolling students who had failed one of the core subjects in the Diploma of Secondary Education, the city’s university entrance exam, to make up for the loss.

“If we want to admit good students, I will relax the admission requirements a little bit, I don’t think it is a problem,” he said.

Lam urged the new government to provide appropriate resources to self-financing universities as they had a role to play in society, not just to take care of the aided institutions.

Meanwhile, Lam revealed his university would launch master’s and bachelor’s programmes in medical laboratory science in 2022 and 2023 respectively in view of the persistent shortage of professionals in the field, and had been granted HK$40 million last year from the Education Bureau for the courses.

Several Western countries, including Britain, have offered “lifeboat” settlement schemes to Hongkongers in response to Beijing’s imposition of a national security law on the city in 2020.

According to the British government, about 5.4 million people among Hong Kong’s population of 7.4 million are eligible for the British National (Overseas) visa scheme, which allows successful applicants and their dependents to live, work, and study in the UK for up to five years. They can then apply for citizenship after six years.

About 123,400 Hongkongers applied between January 2021 and March this year, with 113,742 winning approval.