You want a junior finance job in Hong Kong this year – or you plan to get one when you graduate – but you didn’t study in the city. Which non-local universities are the most popular with banks who’ve been hiring 20-somethings in Hong Kong?
We analysed our CV database to find Hong Kong-based finance professionals with five years’ or less experience. We then identified the 30 most popular universities for people in this group who studied outside of Hong Kong, and we ranked these institutions (including ones in mainland China) by a percentage of the overall top-30 total to produce the ranking below.
Unsurprisingly – it also tops the equivalent chart for Singapore and has historically been a route for leading Hong Kong students to land jobs in banking – the London School of Economics ranks in first position.
Other elite US and UK institutions – for example, Imperial College (7), Cambridge (9), Harvard (13), and Stanford (17) – are fairly well represented in our table.
However, the results also suggest that you don’t need to attend an Ivy League or Oxbridge school to get a banking job in Hong Kong. The University of Toronto is in second place, boosted by its intake of Hong Kong immigrants to Canada who’ve then returned to Hong Kong to work.
Two other Canadian schools (The University of British Columbia and McGill University) also make our list, as do three from Australia, including The University of New South Wales in third spot.
Our chart is also peppered with six mainland universities – Tsinghua and Fudan are in the top 10 – reflecting the recent surge in Chinese graduates taking Hong Kong-based (but mainland-facing) banking jobs. On a much smaller scale, Singaporeans bankers are also coming to Hong Kong for work – the National University of Singapore is in 16th position.
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