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The Government announced today (August 8) that under the Study Subsidy Scheme for Designated Professions/Sectors (SSSDP), a total of 1 030 subsidised places in 15 programmes will be provided by six post-secondary institutions for the cohort to be admitted in the 2016/17 academic year. Details of the participating institutions, the programmes and the number of places to be subsidised under each programme are listed in the Annex.
The SSSDP was launched as a new initiative under the 2014 Policy Address to subsidise about 1 000 students per cohort starting from the 2015/16 academic year to pursue designated full-time locally accredited self-financing undergraduate programmes in selected disciplines. The Scheme aims to achieve the following objectives:
(a) To increase the supply of subsidised undergraduate places by leveraging the supply of the self-financing sector;
(b) To nurture talent in support of specific industries with urgent or keen demand for human resources;
(c) To encourage the self-financing post-secondary education sector to offer programmes in selected disciplines that meet Hong Kong's social and economic needs by providing targeted financial support; and
(d) To support the healthy and sustainable development of the self-financing post-secondary education sector to complement the University Grants Committee-funded sector in broadening and diversifying study opportunities.
There are 940 places subsidised under the SSSDP for the 2015/16 cohort. For the 2016/17 cohort, there will be 90 more subsidised places, namely 60 places in the Bachelor of Nursing (Honours) programme offered by the Caritas Institute of Higher Education and 30 places in the Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in Horticulture and Landscape Management programmes offered by the Vocational Training Council - Technological and Higher Education Institute of Hong Kong.
The programmes and number of places to be subsidised under the SSSDP were determined by the Education Bureau in consultation with relevant policy bureaux. The programmes supported by the SSSDP fall under six disciplines that have been identified as having keen and urgent demand for talent, namely health care, architecture and engineering, testing and certification, the creative industry, logistics, and tourism and hospitality.
Allocation of the subsidised places will mainly go through the Joint University Programmes Admissions System (JUPAS) to ensure that eligible students are selected through a merit-based system.
The SSSDP will be administered by a two-tier arrangement in which a subsidy of up to $40,000 per year will be provided to each student admitted to a designated programme that is not laboratory-based while a higher subsidy of up to $70,000 per year will be provided to each student admitted to a laboratory-based programme. The subsidy is tenable for the normal duration of the programmes concerned (i.e. four to six years) and will be disbursed to the participating institutions based on the actual enrolment of eligible students. Students accepting subsidised places under the SSSDP will pay a reduced tuition fee after deducting the subsidy from the gross tuition fee. Students in need may still apply for student financial assistance in respect of the actual amount of tuition fees payable.
A dedicated webpage for the SSSDP under Concourse for Self-financing Post-secondary Education is available at (www.cspe.edu.hk/SSSDP) for public access to detailed information about the Scheme. The tuition fee and more information of the programmes to be supported under the SSSDP for the 2016/17 cohort will be available via the webpage later before the commencement of the JUPAS application.
Ends/Saturday, August 8, 2015
Issued at HKT 10:30
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