The Savannah College of Art & Design’s campus in Hong Kong has been cleared by China’s Ministry of Education to accept students from the mainland over a five-year period starting this fall.
The move will let SCAD recruit students from the world’s most populous nation to a campus focusing on “creative careers” and heavy on digital media, boasting degrees in 15 disciplines including advertising, animation, fashion management, a master’s in luxury and fashion management and more.
Since its launch in 2010, SCAD Hong Kong has become a magnet for students around Asia. More than 40 countries were represented among its 546 students in 2015-16. The most popular major, by far, was graphic design, with 16.3 percent of enrollees. In U.S. undergraduate programs, mainland Chinese students tend to focus less on creative fields and more on business and engineering.
SCAD’s Savannah and Atlanta campuses have also grown popular among Asian students seeking an American experience. The private university hosted 2,272 foreign students in 2014-15, according to the New York-based Institute of International Education. That’s more than the University of Georgia, whose student body is almost exactly three times as large. (It’s unclear if the SCAD numbers include non-U.S. students in Hong Kong and its campus in Lacoste, France.)
SCAD Hong Kong officials were traveling and unavailable to comment on the timing of its decision to open the floodgates for mainland Chinese students or the administrative procedures required by the government to do so.
The numbers of mainland students applying to Hong Kong’s universities has declined in recent years, perhaps due to greater opportunities for mainlanders in other countries combined with political turmoil in the formerly British-ruled city, which has seen its relationship with the mainland grow more testy after the pro-democracy Occupy Central protests in late 2014.
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