Bulletin Number Two 1985

Profile of 1984 Freshmen The University admitted 1,394 undergraduates in September 1984. A profile of the freshmen could be drawn from the 'Survey of the First-year Students', which was conducted by the Office of Student Affairs and received a high response rate of 98.3%. The overall male to female ratio among the freshmen is 1.7:1. Male students form the majority in the Faculty of Science (83.3%) while about two- thirds of the first-year students of the Faculty of Arts are female. The average age of the students is 19.1 years, which is slightly higher than that of the previous year. The male and female averages are 19.2 and 18.9 respectively. Seventy-two percent of the students surveyed profess no religious beliefs. Those who do are mainly Protestants (21.4%) and Catholics (4.8%). Prior to admission to this University, about 64% of the freshmen had completed Form/Middle 6 and 14.6% Form 7. 3.4% of them had attended post- secondary schools and 15% had undertaken private studies. In general, the students (98.4%) were active in extra-curricular activities at school and 68% had travelled outside Hong Kong. Approximately 63% of the freshmen had had some form of paid employment before entering the university. The majority of the 1984 freshmen indicated that they had confidence in adapting to university life. Of the different areas in which they anticipated difficulty, the ones in which they showed the most concern were adaptation to the University's teaching method (22.2%), coping with the tutorials (20.9%), and understanding reading materials in English (19.5%). Possibly because of the anxiety caused by the long series of examinations they had to go through, close to 80% of the freshmen were troubled, to various extents, by emotional problems during the three months before entering university. The problems were deemed serious in the case of another 10.5% of the students. The educational standard of parents this year is similar to that of last year: about 8.5% of the fathers and 4.5% of the mothers have received education at tertiary level. 24.9% of the fathers and 16% of the mothers were educated to secondary standard. About half of the parents have completed primary school education. As for the fathers' occupation, 21% are semi-skilled workers, 9.8% store-owners and 8.9% service workers, while 12.9% of them are in retirement. A majority of the mothers (63.2%) are housewives, while 18.5% of them are employed as semi-skilled workers. The Survey revealed that 15.5% of the freshmen came from families with a monthly household income of $9,000 or above, while the average was $5,949. The average monthly household income per head was $1,067.9, an increase by some 16% over the previous year's figure ($919.7). The majority of the freshmen (57.2%) live in Kowloon. About 22% of them live in the New Territories and 18.9% on Hong Kong Island. Slightly less than half (49.5%) of them live in public housing estates, with a living area of 2.6 to 5 square metres per person. This suggests that many of them (36.5%) live and study in rather congested conditions. The average size of household of the students is 5.8 persons. Nearly three quarters of the freshmen expressed a strong need for campus accommodation. Another reason for such a need is the time taken to commute between campus and home (more than two hours for 58% of them). About 66.1% of the students expected to obtain some form of financial support for university education from Government grants and loans and that about 40% of them intended to take up summer or part-time jobs to help provide for their education expenses. Close to three quarters of the freshmen had to rely in varying degrees on their families for financial support. An overwhelming majority of the freshmen (97%) selected their major field of study because of RECENT DEVELOPMENTS 19