Comparing strategic management approaches at higher education institutions of Hong Kong

Abstract

This research aims to explore how higher education institutions in Hong Kong increase their competitiveness via strategic management; provide comparative strategic management approaches of 4 kinds of higher education institutions and the relationship of strategic management and quality assurance. First of all, it will be divided into two parts, namely, external-prospective and internal-prospective.

The first part is external-prospective. In this session, the foci will be outside the universities. It will start from the global trend of higher education, the purposes of higher education, and institutional mergers. Internal prospective mainly focuses on the institution itself. This part will be conducted by looking at the areas of institutional governance and quality assurance. It will provide some statistical analysis to compare the higher education institutions in Hong Kong. For example, achievement, mission statement, the scale of international students to local students, international faculties, international project as well as partnership with other institutions and organizations.

In addition, this paper will also explore the correlation of strategic and quality assurance in higher education. Starting from 2000, the higher education in Hong Kong, especially in the sub-degree sector, developed very rapidly. Such dramatic expansion in post-secondary education has raised a serious questions on how to maintain the quality, performance as well as the overall standard in the entire sector under sustainable increase in number of students and the number of institutions which providing the sub-degree programmes. In this regard, quality assurance in higher education is the foundation stone to uphold the entire development of the higher education sector.

In view of the abovementioned approaches to this research paper, the hypotheses to be tested are (1) it is believed that the relationship among the competitiveness of universities, international benchmarking of universities and implementing strategic management is highly interrelated. (2) Under increasing competition in higher education sector in Hong Kong, local universities are increasingly using strategic plans to help their divisions achieve realizable goals and get more or better financial and human resources from a variety of stakeholder groups, and (3) there is a positive correlation between strategic management and quality assurance in higher education sector.