There is no question that, when it comes to higher education, Hong Kong is the best.

Consider that there are only around eight million people in Hong Kong, not all of whom are of school age or, more precisely, of post-secondary school age. In fact, less than 30 percent of Hong Kong's population actually completes an undergraduate degree.

Not even the United States with its 4,140 colleges and universities or the United Kingdom with its 109 are proportionately better. Per capita, with roughly one university for every 300,000 persons of post-secondary age, Hong Kong is head and shoulders above every other place in the world.

It is not only in quantity but also in quality that Hong Kong would hold the title, if there were one, of "The Best Place to Study."

Consider that, in the latest edition of the Times Higher Education World University Rankings (2014-2015), six of Hong Kong's universities were ranked among the top 350 in the world:

The University of Hong Kong (ranked 43, founded 1911);

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (ranked 51, founded 1991);

The Chinese University of Hong Kong (ranked 129, founded 1963);

City University of Hong Kong (ranked 192, founded 1984);

The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (ranked 201 to 225, founded 1937);

Hong Kong Baptist University (ranked 301 to 350, founded 1956).

Contrast that with the UK, whose best universities are ranked top in the world. The former president of Universities UK Sir Roderick Floud, in a speech at Gresham College in London on June 19, had to admit that at least half of the UK's universities should be closed down. That could never be said of Hong Kong's universities, most of which are pulling at or above their intellectual weight.

What makes Hong Kong so conducive to higher education?

Clearly, a major factor is the blend of the higher learning traditions of China and the UK. Hong Kong has the best of East and West. In contrast, for example, Caltech, Harvard, and Stanford (the USA's top universities) are located in a country that generally limits itself only to scholarship presented in the English language and is therefore, academically speaking, "linguistically challenged". Hong Kong's students are plurilingual, not only in terms of the languages they speak daily, but in terms of the books that they read, have read, or with which they are familiar. (How many American college students, for example, have heard of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms?)

Another major factor is the availability of cutting-edge technology. I was a visiting fellow at the University of Oxford in the late 1980s, and at that time, we were not exactly at the forefront of technology. In contrast, when I need to talk to my colleagues today in Hong Kong, I communicate through e-mail or Viber on my smartphone. (I apologize to the University of Oxford - ranked third in the world - if things are different now.) I only remember having to deposit all my worldly belongings at the door of the Bodleian and enter the reading room with no more than an old-fashioned piece of paper and an even more old-fashioned lead pencil.

I have visited many major universities worldwide, either on academic duties or as a visitor, and have some stereotypes about Hong Kong professors.

First, they are less obsessive-compulsive than some professors in the US, who seem to have nothing on their minds except the publications they are writing. Hong Kong professors do have time to simply take coffee or tea, and discuss wider subject matter than what they are doing in the classroom or the laboratory.

On the other hand, they are not as laid back as some professors in Europe, who seem to have all the time in the world to frequent sidewalk cafs taking refreshments. Hong Kong professors do panic about upcoming deadlines, their class preparations, and the papers they have to submit for this or that journal or conference.

Hong Kong professors, notably do not walk like walkathon champions through the hallways of their campus buildings, but on the other hand, neither are they always pausing to admire the flowers that can be seen through their windows.

In short, Hong Kong professors enjoy life both on and off campus. That enjoyment, I am pretty sure, is contagious, and students are obviously filled with the same admirable blend of seriousness with regard to their studies and healthy distrust of things academic.

In literature, we call this a sense of irony - the sense that our world is the best but also the worst of all possible worlds. That sense of irony is at the root of the intellectual discipline and daring innovation that characterize Hong Kong's universities. No wonder they are, proportionately speaking, the best in the world.

The author is president of the Manila Times College and former Philippine Under-Secretary of Education.

(HK Edition 11/06/2014 page10)