Exploring the future-ready graduate attributes across the undergraduate curricula from the eight publicly funded Hong Kong universities in the era of academic entrepreneurism

Abstract

Given Hong Kong’s robust, high-performing, and entrepreneurial higher education system, universities are preparing their students to adapt, contribute, and thrive as productive workers, capable citizens, and life-long learners. With the employment of both qualitative document analysis and inductive thematic analysis, this study aims to analyse how the eight publicly funded universities in Hong Kong conceptualise and frame their graduate attributes, and reveal the similarities and differences of their underlying motivations and implications. This study brings together eight discourses, namely life-long learning, critical thinking, communication and collaboration, interdisciplinary mindset, contextual systems thinking, commitment and responsibility, ethical values and moral principles, as well as technological capability. Using both the lenses of academic entrepreneurism and future readiness, although several attributes are founded to be academically entrepreneurial in orientation due to the emphasis on equipping students with individual skills and dispositions, some other attributes are bringing students back to the humanistic and social nature of human beings, which reveal that Hong Kong universities are preparing their future-ready students both as agents for personal development and of social good. This study can inform how various universities worldwide can revamp and reinvigorate a common set of future-ready graduate attributes, while contextualising and adapting institution-specific variations.