Understanding Hong Kong and Mainland university students’ intentions to study overseas after the COVID-19 crisis

A recent survey “Understanding Hong Kong and Mainland university students’ intentions to study overseas after the COVID-19 crisis”, conducted by the School of Graduate Studies of Lingnan University (LU) finds that only 16 per cent of respondents have plans to pursue postgraduate studies abroad. In addition, Hong Kong is the second most popular post-COVID study destination, just behind the US and ahead of the UK. The research team points out that the pandemic is shifting the mobility flow of international students, and that East Asian countries and regions are facing more opportunities in the increasingly competitive higher education sector for international students

A Comparative Study of Ethnic Minority-Serving Higher Education Institutions in the United States and China

American Indians and Alaska Natives (AIANs) in the United States and Ethnic Minorities (EMs) in China are both underrepresented groups in their higher education (HE) systems regarding access and attainment. Also, their cultures and languages confront challenges in contemporary societies dominated by the mainstream cultures and languages, as well as the trend of globalization. Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs) in the United States and Ethnic Minority- Serving Institutions (EMSIs) in China increasingly play a significant role in changing the disadvantageous situations of AIAN and Chinese Ethnic Minority (CEM) students in both HE systems. Also, they are critical in AIAN tribal nation building and CEM policy implementation, as well as in the preservation of indigenous and ethnic minority languages, cultures, and identities. TCUs and EMSIs face some common challenges such as financial constraints and student readiness for HE and preparation for the job market, as well as unique challenges caused by the specific political and HE contexts in the United States and China. This dissertation is based on a qualitative comparative study of ethnic minority-serving higher education institutions (HEIs)—TCUs and EMSIs. To answer the central research question—how TCUs and EMSIs address challenges in serving AIANs and CEMs—the author conducted a series of in-depth, semi-structured oral interviews with 29 TCU and EMSI administrators and content area experts (CAEs) of AIAN and EM HE in the United States and China. Findings from this study confirm that TCUs and EMSIs play significant roles in providing HE opportunities to AIAN and CEM students, as well as in preserving indigenous and ethnic cultures and languages. Both TCUs and EMSIs enjoy some similar facilitating factors including favorable external environments and internal characteristics and efforts. They also face similar challenges, some of which are opposites to the listed facilitating factors. In response to the challenges, TCUs and EMSIs present some exemplary strategies and good practices, which demonstrate the great potential of the education and services they provide to their students and communities. From a comparative perspective, the efforts of TCUs and EMSIs in addressing these challenges sometimes differ because of their respective political and HE contexts. TCUs tend to have more of a pragmatic and institutional-level focus to solve current problems and continue their successful strategies and practices. In comparison, the efforts of EMSIs are influenced largely by Chinese national policies, which are not only on HE but also in other areas like the economy, development, and foreign affairs. Therefore, EMSIs focus on efforts to better take advantage of resources brought by national policies

Sustainability Practices of Higher Education Institutions in Hong Kong: A Case Study of a Sustainable Campus Consortium

Eight University Grant Committee (UGC)-funded public universities in Hong Kong positively and successfully responded to the global call for sustainability efforts in higher education institutions (HEIs). Various initiatives are transpiring within these eight campuses. The Hong Kong Sustainable Campus Consortium (HKSCC) was co-established by eight UGC-funded universities, which is an excellent example of integrating resources and efforts to achieve sustainable development goals and exert positive social impacts. Through interviews with HKSCC administrators and members and reviewing relevant documents, this study aims to examine the roles and challenges of HKSCC toward Hong Kong HEIs’ sustainability efforts, and present the good practices and achievements of HKSCC. Findings of this study reveal that although HKSCC and each UGC-funded university contribute in reaching the sustainability goals, they should pay considerable attention to the external impact of sustainability practices on communities and society. Moreover, we propose that the sustainable development of public universities in Hong Kong should look beyond the narrowed definition of sustainable development and broaden their roles to exert a social impact by addressing the negative consequences of the massification, privatization, and internationalization of higher education

Nested Maximum Entropy Designs for Computer Experiments

Presently, computer experiments with multiple levels of accuracy are widely applied in science and engineering. This paper introduces a class of nested maximum entropy designs for such computer experiments. A multi-layer DETMAX algorithm is proposed to construct nested maximum entropy designs. Based on nested maximum entropy designs, we also propose an integer-programming procedure to specify the sample sizes in multi-fidelity computer experiments. Simulated annealing techniques are used to tackle complex optimization problems in the proposed methods. Illustrative examples show that the proposed nested entropy designs can yield better prediction results than nested Latin hypercube designs in the literature and that the proposed sample-size determination method is effective

Online learning experience of university students under COVID-19

Only 27 per cent of university students in Hong Kong were satisfied with their online learning during the COVID-19 outbreak, and 60 per cent found online learning less beneficial than classroom teaching, a recent survey by the School of Graduate Studies of Lingnan University (LU) reveals

Interactive discussion on online learning experiences amid the COVID-19 pandemic

In this interactive discussion session, student participants will be invited to take a short survey on their online learning experiences during the pandemic. The survey results will be revealed immediately, and all participants will be invited to discuss the results and reflect on their own online learning and teaching experiences

An Ensemble Method for Feature Screening

It is known that feature selection/screening for high-dimensional nonparametric models is an important but very difficult issue. In this paper, we first point out the limitations of existing screening methods. In particular, model-free sure independence screening methods, which are defined on random predictors, may completely miss some important features in the underlying nonparametric function when the predictors follow certain distributions. To overcome these limitations, we propose an ensemble screening procedure for nonparametric models. It elaborately combines several existing screening methods and outputs a result close to the best one of these methods. Numerical examples indicate that the proposed method is very competitive and has satisfactory performance even when existing methods fail

Some Notes on Concordance between Optimization and Statistics

Many engineering problems require solutions to statistical optimization problems. When the global solution is hard to attain, engineers or statisticians always use the better solution because we intuitively believe a principle, called better solution principle (BSP) in this paper, that a better solution to a statistical optimization problem also has better statistical properties of interest. This principle displays some concordance between optimization and statistics and is expected to widely hold. Since theoretical study on BSP seems to be neglected by statisticians, this paper presents a primary discussion on BSP within a relatively general framework. We demonstrate two comparison theorems as the key results of this paper. Their applications to maximum likelihood estimation are presented. It can be seen that BSP for this problem holds under reasonable conditions; i.e., an estimator with greater likelihood is better in some statistical sense

Removal of Nitrogen and COD from Reclaimed Water during Long-Term Simulated Soil Aquifer Treatment System under Different Hydraulic Conditions

Reclaimed water is an important supplementary source for fresh water. Purification is necessary prior to utilization in order to minimize the pollution and human-health risk. A three-year experiment was carried out to study the removal of nitrogen and organics through a simulated soil aquifer treatment (SAT) system under continuous wetting and wetting/drying conditions. The removal performance of nitrogen and chemical oxygen demand (COD) was improved in the wetting/drying column. The average removal efficiencies of the three years were 51% and 78% for the NO3–N, 41% and 51% for the NH4–N, and 40% and 50% for the COD in the continuous wetting and wetting/drying columns. Nitrogen and COD removal mainly took place within the top 20 cm of the columns, which was highly correlated with the distribution of microorganisms. The amount of microorganisms was also positively correlated with the content of organic matter and dissolved oxygen (DO) in both soil columns. NO3–N can be removed effectively via aerobic denitrifying bacteria as the DO concentration was 3–6 mg/L. DO and NO3–N were simultaneously reduced as the electron acceptors for COD degradation, and DO only accounted for 40% of total electron acceptor in COD degradation for the continuous wetting column. Nitrogen and COD can be effectively and steadily removed from reclaimed water during the long-term operation of a SAT system