The classroom mimics a real-life salon. Mirrors are placed in various places. Blow dryers are plugged in. In the trolleys nearby, haircutting scissors and curling irons are within reach. There are several hair-washing recliners in the left corner.

The teacher stood at the front, as he showed students how to cut the hair on a mannequin head. Unfortunately, Mac Au was too far away to see the details of his teacher’s lessons. Their phones were kept in a transparent cabinet, so he couldn’t even play with it like he would in his other classes. He started to feel bored.

Au is a second-year student majoring in Hairdressing at Youth College. The institution is run by the Vocational Training Council, providing vocational education for students who dropped out of traditional schools during their third to fifth year of secondary school.

The Education Bureau thinks that vocational education plays a pivotal role in nurturing the requisite talents to support Hong Kong’s development. It can provide diversified learning and employment opportunities for young people.

From 2020 to 2022, Hong Kong lost about 140,000 workers, mainly associate professionals like science technicians and nurses, service and sales workers, plant and machine operators and assemblers, Secretary for Labour and Welfare Chris Sun said last November in a response to a legislator.

“Many industries do not have young people joining them now, so we want to promote vocational education,”

Legislator Lam Chun Sing

Compared to traditional academic education, vocational education focuses more on training students with practical skills, so that they can work proficiently after graduation.

The training cycle for vocational education is also shorter which allows students to finish their studies and fill the vacancies sooner. For students like Au, who left mainstream high school, it will take around three years to get a Diploma of Vocational Education. Then they can already go to work, while most of their peers have just started their college life at that time.

However, vocational education still lacks in student enrollment as some believe the training to be invaluable. There is a deviation between the vision and reality of developing vocational education.

According to the Hong Kong government, there are about 6,000 full-time students at Youth College during the 2020/2021 academic year while ordinary secondary schools have about 200,000 students from year three to five. At the post-secondary level, the number of students choosing traditional academic pathways such as bachelor’s and associate degrees is about three times higher than that of students attending higher diplomas.

In 2018, only 20.7% of the students surveyed were interested in pursuing vocational education. If their academic performance is good enough to enter other academic education, such as a bachelor’s degree program, then they said they would not consider vocational schools.

The inadequate promotion system also discourages many students from pursuing vocational education. “They feel that after finishing vocational education, they can only get one job and keep doing that for the rest of their lives. There’s no chance to get a promotion,” explained Lam.

Learning on my Own

But Au felt that “what the school teaches is only some practical techniques, like how to hold the barber scissors and the angle of hair cutting, which will help a little.” He still had to learn a lot of operational ideas on his own. The teachers would not teach much about how to pick different techniques based on hair texture, face shape, and facial features.

The Youth College has not yet responded to the request for comment on its teaching quality.

Au is interested in styling. He feels a great sense of accomplishment when he is able to turn his hairstyling ideas into a reality. However, he feels that the lessons do not reflect the current trends and are stuck in older styles. For example, he wants to learn about present trends consisting of softer hairstyles, but his teacher is stuck in teaching styles from the 90s. 

These stylists would film their working process. In the videos, they would show how to balance their personal style with the customers’ requests. From adjusting hair colour, perming hair, to cutting bangs, they can create suitable hairstyles for customers.

After seeing more, he gradually became familiar with the different techniques. When meeting with friends, he would unconsciously observe their hairstyles and offer advice.

In class, Au usually sits in the front row of the classroom. Although he talks with his friends from time to time, they will complete the task assigned by the teachers.

On the contrary, the back rows are a different world, there are students who don’t want to learn, including those referred to as “gangster students.” Sometimes they would ask Au if they didn’t know the answer to a test. Au took it as a trade for peace, as he knew that these students would call their friends if conflict was to arise, in which he feared the potential fight outside of school. 

Au thought the teachers would be aware of the students’ conditions, but they would rarely step in. Only when the students in the back got too loud would the teachers try to intervene.

As required by the Youth College, students only need to achieve a passing grade of 40. If they fail, they have to retake the course. However, the attendance rate must be above 80%, and failure to meet this requirement would lead to expulsion from the school.

“I can understand the teachers’ difficulties and stress,” Au said. “They are trying to help us.”

To get more students to pass the course, teachers would try to help absent students make up extra classes, or they would find ways to increase their performance marks to pull up their overall scores.

An Inferior Education System

During her fourth year, Au felt a huge pressure from her classmates. Everyone was preparing for the Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education Examination (DSE), which is the university entrance examination.

She had to spend more than HK$6,000 a month on tutoring, but she still could not keep up with others. She became anxious and suffered from insomnia, and eventually suspended her studies after speaking with a social worker.

Before that, she was completely unaware of Youth College because her former school only focused on college admissions so vocational education was not mentioned at all.

Au came across Youth College’s advertisement on social media and made a hasty decision to enroll. Her choice was opposed by her secondary school teachers at that time. They thought that vocational students were terrible students and Au would be influenced by them.

From her mother’s perspective, it was only normal to enter college through the traditional educational path, and those who became doctors or teachers were considered good children. Au remembered her mother saying that if she went to vocational school, she “wouldn’t be able to make any money in the future.” Her choice led to a dispute between them. Her mother kept urging her to return to her old school.

During her college summer vacation, Au took an internship as an assistant engineer at a construction site. She needed to use some computer software skills to calculate building data. These operations and calculation methods were all that she learned in vocational school. The other undergraduate students needed to receive the company’s training from scratch because they had not learned these practical skills.

“What the vocational school mainly taught was some knowledge and skills that would be used in the workplace, and it was more practical. The things I learned in college are more academic. I often don’t understand why I need to learn those,” Sandy said.

Au said that most of her teachers in vocational schools have long working experience and have accumulated many contacts in the industry, so they can recommend students for more job opportunities. But many of her university teachers have not worked before, and started to teach right after finishing their PhD, so they emphasised the importance of academic research.

The Promotion of Vocational Education

To rebrand the program, the government renamed vocational education to vocational and professional education. The Education Bureau set up a website dedicated to providing information on vocational education and launched its Facebook and Instagram accounts.

The website created animated characters of five different professions, such as caregivers and arborists. They introduce various vocational courses through comics to improve public awareness.

“Although the government does have some promotional measures, those advertisements simply keep telling students to go to vocational schools, which can be very ineffective,”

Lam Chun Sing, legislator focused on vocational education issues

Although the authorities have emphasised the need to promote vocational education, the government’s Task Force on the Promotion of Vocational Education stated in its 2020 review report that the main challenge remains “to change the public perception of it as an inferior choice relative to academic articulation pathways.”

Therefore, the successor, John Lee, proposed in his 2022 policy address to promote vocational education “as a pathway parallel to conventional academic education.”

However, the focus of this administration has been to attract top talent and further strengthen the pursuit of higher academic education. The enhancement of attracting vocational talents is still limited.

Hong Kong implemented the Top Talent Pass Scheme last year, aiming to attract outstanding global workforces to Hong Kong. It applies to those who earn more than HK$2.5 million a year or graduates from the top 100 universities in the world.

Meanwhile, Lee has also proposed to develop Hong Kong into an international innovation and technology centre. As a result, the technology talent admission scheme has been optimised. Through fast-track processing and arrangements, it aims to attract more non-local technology talent.

The new policy stipulates that it is no longer mandatory for technology companies to hire additional local employees, and the scope of application has been extended to more emerging fields such as green technology and Internet of Things.

“The Hong Kong government has been promoting elite education, and much of the publicity now is about top-end, scientific talent,” legislator Lillian Kwok added. “Even if the top talents can conduct the research, there is a lack of middle-level technical talents in the production chain. And vocational students can help fill the vacancies in the middle.”

Climbing the Promotional Ladder

For students like her who have not taken the university entrance exam, or others who do not meet the minimum requirements for joint admissions, they can still apply directly to a university’s degree program.

Since Au already completed a two-year Higher Diploma, she would not need to start the four-year bachelor’s program from the beginning. According to the admission regulations, she could study straight from the third year. With two more years of studies, she could obtain a bachelor’s degree.

Au weighs the options of working and going to university repeatedly. For civil engineering, the average monthly salary for a Higher Diploma graduate from the Institute of Vocational Education is HK$17,500, while that for a Polytechnic University Bachelor graduate is about HK$22,000. She also learned that some of her classmates could get a higher salary than an undergraduate.

However, if she wanted to get a qualification license from the Hong Kong Institution of Engineers, she must have a bachelor’s degree. Vocational students can only become assistant engineers responsible for installation, maintenance, and testing of engineering projects. A licensed engineer, on the other hand, can supervise the project.

“Undergraduates will have better development prospects, with the authority to take charge of projects and to help the company to train new apprentices,” Sandy explained, finally choosing to proceed to the university.

For Higher Diploma graduates, if they want to pursue a bachelor’s degree, most of them would need to go back on the academic track and stop their vocational training.

At present, only four applied degree programs are offered under trial in Hong Kong, including nursing and gerontology, which have been launched in the 2022/23 academic year. According to the Education Bureau, the qualification levels are the same as those of traditional academic degrees.

“There aren’t enough university courses in applied learning right now, and most majors don’t match up with those in vocational schools. Many vocational students get stuck when they want to get promoted,”

Legislator Kwok

The government said in March that it wants to introduce more applied degree programs.

Kwok also suggested that there should be strong career-oriented schools from the secondary level, so that students who are not good at academics can have the choice to change schools.

The latest government budget proposed for the VTC to launch a new pilot program in the next academic year. Several pilot schools will be selected from Band 2 and Band 3 schools, experimenting with the dual-track system during high school, so that some secondary school students can be exposed to vocational education earlier, added Lam.

While in traditional school, Mac Au had no idea what he was going to do in the future. He was troubled by his learning disability and had difficulty in reading and comprehension. He slept through every class and scored in the single digits on tests. He felt that “time was wasted” from primary school until he transferred to Youth College.

Christina Yu, a professor at the Hong Kong University of Education, had seen many such students in her class during her early days of teaching in secondary school. She felt that they were like trapped animals, being forced to sit in the classroom by the education system, but unable to take interest in learning. These students left a deep impression on her and made her start thinking about how to meet their needs.

“Why not offer some subjects that are suitable for their development? For instance, some courses are learning by doing. It can give an additional pathway to these students who have different learning needs.” Yu said in an interview.

After completing the Diploma of Vocational Education at Youth College, Au did not intend to continue his studies. He felt that he was already struggling a bit and that he would encounter more difficulties if he went on for a Higher Diploma.

He plans to go to a hair salon in Tsim Sha Tsui as an apprentice first, so that he can follow the masters in learning haircutting techniques. His ultimate goal is to open his own store, to combine coffee and haircutting services, so that if a couple came for example, the woman could get her hair cut while the man drinks his coffee on the other side, enjoying each other’s company.

But the rent for this store would not be cheap. He assumes that his monthly salary as a barber would be around HK$10,000, and it would be difficult to save enough money for the store alone. So, he began to learn about investments too in hopes of bringing another source of income in this way.

“If I do make it to open a store, it will be in about 20 years,” Au said.