Hong Kong universities' mounting, and increasingly successful, efforts to recruit bright students across China have reminded their prestigious mainland counterparts that their status as the country's mecca for higher education may not be as secure as they used to believe.

Unless the mainland's universities acknowledge their shortcomings and undertake necessary reforms, it is not impossible that the halo surrounding such names as Peking University and Tsinghua University gradually vanishes as they lose out in an increasingly globalized and competitive education sector.

Officials running the mainland's universities should try to better understand what makes Hong Kong's seats of learning so attractive, and take steps to improve their institutions.

So many mainland students are attracted to Hong Kong as a result of its universities' advanced educational methods, professionalism and financial support to the most intelligent students.

Many Chinese universities have declared their ambition to lift themselves into the rankings of Harvard, Oxford and the Sorbonne.

However, they have been slow in moving in that direction.

After a few false starts, such as introducing a competitive system among teachers at Peking University, efforts by the universities and by educational authorities to address underlying shortcomings have flagged.

An official-dominated administrative system, which is detrimental to a real academic environment, remains in place. Universities remain wanting in terms of incentives for teachers to improve teaching quality. And as tuition fees and living expenses surge, the financial aid system for students remains in a rudimentary state.

On the other hand, the growing cult in society of Peking, Tsinghua and other top universities has given people on these two campuses an illusion that they are good enough and their position is unassailable.

Hopefully, this challenge from the Hong Kong universities can awake them from their complacency.

It might be difficult to tell whether mainland or Hong Kong universities are stronger. But the former certainly have a lot to learn from the latter. The advantages of proximity, a shared language and closer personal relations make it easier for mainland schools to learn from Hong Kong counterparts than from Western ones.

A growing outflow of intelligent students to Hong Kong and foreign countries should definitely not be taken as a brain drain. Many of them will return to the mainland with an international perspective, and an understanding of a different social system and culture, as well as knowledge and professional skills.

After all, it is good for Chinese students to have more choices of universities.

Given the limited enrolment capacity of Hong Kong universities, mainland universities will remain the first choice for the majority of mainland students.

But their diminishing appeal to the nation's smartest young minds should be a wake-up call that ought not to be ignored.