How can Hong Kong continue to maintain its impressive stability in the face of enormous structural changes in the economy, massive population shifts and gross and persistent social inequalities? This short essay will certainly fail to tackle such a big and complex question. However, I, as an educator, would venture to suggest that one of the most important and often overlooked factors in the city's stability was the upward social mobility of youngsters through education.

As the noted historian Bernard Luk has pointed out, from the 1960s to the 1990s, varied educational resources were able to provide the work force with different classes of skills and to impart to young people particular disciplines, work ethnics and mobility aspirations in Hong Kong. Education served as a vital vehicle for an individual's upward social mobility. The immense investment in education tackled inter-generational poverty, thus leading to social cohesion and stability in the past.

Unfortunately, unlike the 1980s and 1990s, social inequality and the widening wealth gap has greatly undermined the popularity of the HKSAR government over the past few years. Worse still, believing that their upward social mobility is stymied, many youngsters have started to harbor grievances toward our government.

As early as 2005, former chief executive Donald Tsang set up a Commission on Poverty to deal with social inequality. Inter-generational transfer of poverty was listed at the top of the commission's policy. In view of the growing discontent among the youngsters, Donald Tsang's Policy Address of 2009 pledged to help them move up the ladder of success through education. But, with hindsight, his attempts at placating the youngsters seem to have been futile. Nor did he eventually come up with any concrete plans to solve the problem with more upward social mobility.

Is social mobility really stagnant now in Hong Kong? Some sociologists argue that in the context of economic and industrial restructuring, Hong Kong is increasingly polarized, fitting the scenario of the M-shaped societies. Others have nevertheless contended with this notion. There is little statistical evidence to indicate that ordinary people's living standards are on the decline and social mobility is blocked.

But, in my view, unbridled educational expansion and woeful economic transformation has greatly changed the pattern of social mobility. First, over the past decade, self-financed undergraduate and graduate programs have expanded at a breakneck pace at our universities. To fatten their universities' pockets, the administrators of these self-financed programs have admitted countless youngsters who are not up to the academic standard at our universities. As a result, university graduates have two tiers. The first tier comprises the graduates from government-funded programs who are still competitive in the job market and who secure well-paid managerial jobs with relative ease.

The second tier comprise those from self-financed programs who always find themselves frustrated in their job-hunting efforts. Many second-tier graduates even with bachelor or master's degrees are incapable of speaking and writing both Chinese and English well to cater to the needs of the local job market. Devoid of analytical skills and lacking a global outlook, these graduates can land only jobs which actually do not require university credentials. Unaware of their incompetence and bad qualifications, these second-tier graduates always lambaste the government for the emergence of downward social mobility of university graduates. Some even plunged themselves into various anti-establishment movements.

Second, economic restructuring has led to a decline in job opportunities in the manufacturing sector and growth in service or sales jobs. The expansion of tertiary education but limited availability of professional or managerial jobs has resulted in the inflation of clerical jobs, many of which are filled by tertiary school graduates. Young cohorts who received tertiary education had less chance to become middle class than their older counterparts. In other words, tertiary graduates are increasingly less likely to make into managerial or professional and associate professional jobs. While education is still serving an important avenue for an individual's upward social mobility, it has failed to help all university graduates secure decent jobs.

Third, the overheating property market has added fuel to the fire. Apart from education, investing in the property market was a common and effective way for Hong Kong young people to move higher in the social ladder in the 1980s and 1990s. But, given the skyrocketing price of property nowadays, our youngsters, needless to say, are now feeling that they have been unfairly deprived of one more crucial way to upward social mobility.

Acutely aware of the social inequality, the CY Leung administration has rightly revived the Commission on Poverty. Yet, further actions should be taken to address youngsters' grievance against the government for failing to help them climb the social ladder. It is time for the authorities to review whether the breakneck expansion of our self-financed tertiary programs is incompatible with our current economic structure and whether the universities should calibrate the program content to suit the needs of our job market.

More importantly, like their predecessors, the CY Leung administration should keep exploring the possibilities of new industries to broaden our economic structure, thereby facilitating the career development of our youngsters and allaying their fear and frustration.

The author is a lecturer at Hong Kong Polytechnic University and a former Scouloudi research fellow at London University.

(HK Edition 11/22/2012 page3)