Ethnographic Study of a Community College in Hong Kong

Over the last two decades, the Hong Kong government, as with governments in many societies, has taken an expansion of higher education as a strategy—a community college policy specifically—to equip young people with skills and knowledge for a new economy in tandem with promoting their social mobility. What seems overlooked is social nurturance could contradict social mobility when such an educational policy is implemented in a neo-liberal context. This book offers an ethnography on the learning of students at a community college in Hong Kong between 2005 and 2009 towards the goal of getting transferred to university; it illustrates how the community college policy could lead to distorted outcomes. In particular, the observation that some students could succeed in getting a transfer without really learning urges policy makers to recognise that inducing people with a demand for a bachelor's degree qualification does not necessarily lead them to take learning seriously.