The Academic 'College': A Study of PolyU's Three-Way Division of Labour among the College of Undergraduate Studies, Interdisciplinary Degrees, and CPCE

Bottom line: PolyU does not run a college system. Common-core undergraduate education is coordinated by the College of Undergraduate Studies (upgraded in 2025), which oversees 30 credits of general-education requirements. Interdisciplinarity is expressed through a standalone degree, the BDSIS (JS3000, roughly 30 students per cohort). The self-financing CPCE and the research-focused PAIR are entirely separate organisations. They share the word "college" and almost nothing else.

The same English word—College—is used on PolyU's official website to denote at least three completely unrelated entities: one that manages compulsory general-education credits for all undergraduates; one that runs self-financing associate-degree programmes on the other side of the city; and one that does no undergraduate teaching at all, focusing purely on interdisciplinary research. The CUHK logic—where a "College" carries a student's whole-person education, lifelong affiliation, motto and anthem—simply does not apply at PolyU. There is no permanent college membership, no college motto, no college song. So how does a university with no college system structure the common-core education, language training and interdisciplinary exploration of more than twenty thousand undergraduates? This piece unpacks PolyU's three "College / Academy" units, laying out what each actually does. It is the academic-structure companion to the sister articles Colleges and Accommodation (No College System at This University) and Residential Life at PolyU. The earlier two articles cover "living"; this one covers "learning".

# How many types of "College / Academy" units does PolyU actually have?

PolyU's academic skeleton is the two-tier structure of Faculty plus Department/School. According to the PolyU education page "Faculties, Schools and College", the university has seven Faculties and several independent Schools (such as the School of Design, the School of Fashion and Textiles, and the School of Hotel and Tourism Management). The source of genuine confusion lies in three units that all use the word College, yet belong to entirely different systems.

The only thing these three share is the label. The College of Undergraduate Studies determines which common-core courses every UGC-funded undergraduate must complete before graduation. CPCE provides a self-financing progression ladder for students who do not enter a UGC-funded undergraduate programme. PAIR does not even offer classes; it is a collaborative research platform for more than six hundred senior researchers. Conflating them is the most common mistake outsiders make when reading PolyU's structure. The rest of this article untangles each in turn.

# What is the College of Undergraduate Studies, and why was it upgraded in 2025?

The College of Undergraduate Studies (CUS) is the academic unit that coordinates the common-core education of all PolyU undergraduates. It was formerly the Office of Undergraduate Studies (OUS). According to the CUS website, the College was established in 2025 with a mission "to champion academic excellence, innovative spirit and whole-person development of students through academic programmes, interdisciplinary studies, and General University Requirements (GUR)." The shift from "Office" to "College" signals that a unit originally conceived as an administrative body has been elevated to the same standing as a Faculty, now directly bearing academic responsibility for interdisciplinary degree programmes and general-education curricula.

A point that must be made clear: the "College" in PolyU's College of Undergraduate Studies is a homonym for, but conceptually distinct from, the "College" of CUHK. A CUHK college is a residential college to which every undergraduate belongs for life, and which shoulders part of the general education and whole-person development. PolyU's CUS provides neither residential places nor lifelong membership; students "join" it solely as an outcome of academic registration, without any enduring alumni bond. This distinction was already flagged from the "living" angle in the sister article Colleges and Accommodation; here it is confirmed from the "learning" angle: CUS is a coordinating body for curricula and degrees, not a community you can live in and later claim kinship with.

The upgrade from "Office" to "College" was not merely a change of signboard. The original OUS functioned more like an administrative hub that implemented academic regulations. As a College, it acquired two far weightier academic responsibilities: first, formally bringing under its wing programmes that require independent class scheduling and separate admissions, such as the interdisciplinary BDSIS degree; second, stewarding university-wide policies on general education and whole-person development in the capacity of a College, rather than merely "enforcing rules on behalf of other units." This upgrade has proceeded in parallel with PolyU's recent undergraduate-education narrative of "whole-person development + interdisciplinarity + social responsibility," turning that rhetoric into institutional structure.

As for leadership, the CUS "People" page lists the current Dean as Professor Daniel T. L. Shek, who concurrently serves as Associate Vice President (Undergraduate Programme) and Chair Professor of the Department of Applied Social Sciences. The Associate Deans are Professor Juan Chen and Professor Alan Pak Tao Lau; the latter is also Programme Leader of the interdisciplinary BDSIS degree. The fact that the Deanship is held by a sitting Associate Vice President speaks directly to the weight CUS carries in PolyU's governance structure—it is not a marginal administrative office but a nerve centre through which the university's senior management directly controls the quality of undergraduate education.

# Without colleges, who runs the common-core curriculum? The 30-credit GUR skeleton.

In a college-system university, general education is delivered by the colleges and streamed by college affiliation. At PolyU, which has no such system, general education is standardised as a single university-wide set of General University Requirements (GUR), centrally coordinated by CUS. As set out on the CUS GUR page, students on a four-year bachelor's degree programme must complete 30 credits of GUR, of which 12 credits come from the Cluster-Area Requirement (CAR). Those 30 credits constitute PolyU's version of "undergraduate common-core education"—they replace the portion of the curriculum that, in a college system, would be delivered by the colleges.

The four CAR clusters, as listed on the same official page (applicable to students admitted from 2022/23 onwards), are:

Four-year students must take at least one 3-credit subject from each of these four clusters, and within them must satisfy Chinese and English reading and writing requirements (CR/CW, ER/EW). Structurally, this "four clusters + language" arrangement performs the same function as the "knowledge breadth + communication skills" general education in a CUHK college, but the organisational approach is entirely different: at PolyU there is a single university-wide timetable, centrally offered and validated by CUS, and students select courses by cluster code rather than by college affiliation.

It is worth recording how this GUR has expanded in recent years. According to official PolyU guidance, for four-year students admitted from 2022/23 onwards the GUR has been augmented with two new components responding to contemporary concerns: the Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics requirement (AIDA)—to help students "understand the fundamental concepts of AIDA and acquire basic skills in AIDA technology and applications"; and the Innovation and Entrepreneurship requirement (GUR-IE), a 1-credit component that must be completed within the first year of study. In addition, there are Service-Learning (3 credits), Healthy Lifestyle, and Leadership and Intra-Personal Development components. The GUR is therefore not a static checklist but a curriculum policy that is continually updated in response to the university's evolving judgment of what an undergraduate ought to possess.

# Where does the GUR come from? Why must every PolyU undergraduate study the "four clusters" of general education?

To understand the GUR that CUS now administers, one must return to the "334" academic reform of Hong Kong's higher education in 2012. Before then, the undergraduate degree was three years and the general-education component was modest. From the 2012/13 academic year, the shift to a four-year system across the territory created an extra year that most universities used to deepen general education and generic skills training. PolyU's response was the new four-year curriculum and the accompanying GUR that crystallised from it. According to the CUS Curriculum Framework page, the four-year curriculum was designed to deliver "a more flexible, student-centred, holistic professional education." Those 30 GUR credits are precisely the institutional anchor for the "holistic / common-core" layer that sits alongside the "professional education" layer.

The fact that every PolyU undergraduate must complete general education across the four clusters is therefore not the preference of a single department, but a graduation requirement uniformly applied across the entire university and centrally managed and validated by CUS (and its predecessor). This stands in sharp contrast to college-system universities, where general education is delivered by a student's own college. At CUHK, the general education you take may carry your college's name; at PolyU, the GUR you take sits on a single university-wide timetable and is unrelated to your departmental affiliation or whether you live in a hall. The absence of a college system does not mean the absence of general education—only that the organiser of general education has shifted from "college" to "the College of Undergraduate Studies."

# Why is Service-Learning a PolyU signature? The first mandatory credit-bearing requirement in Hong Kong.

Among the various GUR components, Service-Learning merits separate attention because it carries a rare "first" label at PolyU, both in Hong Kong and across Asian higher education. According to the PolyU Service-Learning and Leadership Office, PolyU was the first university in Hong Kong to make Service-Learning a mandatory, credit-bearing graduation requirement: the four-year curriculum framework adopted by the Senate in December 2010 stipulates that all students fulfilling graduation requirements from the 2012/13 academic year onwards must complete a 3-credit Service-Learning subject.

Service-Learning subjects embed community service within academic study, requiring students to apply disciplinary knowledge to real-world social service settings. The official description states that the objectives are to hone problem-solving skills and awaken civic awareness and empathy. One operational detail is worth recording: according to the same official page, Year‑1 students on the four-year programme are not permitted to take a Service-Learning subject in their very first semester; they must first acquire a certain academic grounding before undertaking the service. This "learn first, serve later" sequencing reflects the university's positioning of Service-Learning as "intellectually informed service," rather than raw volunteer hours. Given PolyU's strengths in applied disciplines such as engineering, nursing, and rehabilitation sciences, Service-Learning gives those professional skills a social-application outlet and, in a sense, concretises the university's self-definition of "professional education + social responsibility."

# What else does CUS offer beyond compulsory general education? Two cross-departmental Minors.

CUS does not merely administer the compulsory GUR. It also runs its own cross-departmental Minor programmes, allowing students with spare capacity to add an interdisciplinary label beyond their major. According to the CUS Minor in Research and Innovation entrance requirements page, CUS currently offers two Minors:

The entry threshold for the Minor in Research and Innovation says a great deal about CUS's filtering criteria for "interdisciplinary / research-oriented talent": a hard GPA cut-off of 3.50, plus the requirement that students proactively secure an Assistant Professor or higher-ranked supervisor and submit a research proposal, essentially reserves this pathway for a minority of high-flyers intent on a research career. This aligns with the BDSIS's design as a programme "specially designed for high-calibre students." The interdisciplinary and research-oriented cultivation housed in CUS is, taken as a whole, an elite selection track rather than a universal provision. The universal layer is covered by the compulsory GUR; the distinction layer is carried by the BDSIS and these two Minors. Together, the two layers map out the full functional spectrum of CUS: "common-core foundation + high-flyer extension."

# General education belongs to CUS, the major belongs to the Faculty: how is a degree stitched together?

To understand where CUS sits, one must also see how it divides responsibilities with the Faculties and Schools. A PolyU undergraduate's graduation credits are crudely composed of two blocks: one is the university-wide General University Requirements (GUR), coordinated by CUS; the other is the Discipline-Specific Requirements (DSR), i.e., the Major delivered and validated by the School and the Faculty to which it belongs. The former governs "what every PolyU graduate should share in common," while the latter governs "what a nursing / accounting / building services engineering graduate should know."

This division of labour is the structural hallmark of a university without a college system. In a college-system university, a portion of general education is delivered by the colleges, and a student's identity is therefore threefold—belonging to a department, a college, and a hall. At PolyU, general education is uniformly delivered by CUS, leaving a student's academic identity reduced to a single main axis—the department (major)—overlaid with a university-wide GUR layer. According to the CUS Curriculum Framework page, this two-block structure of "professional education + university-wide common requirements" is precisely the skeleton behind PolyU's positioning of the four-year degree as "student-centred, holistic professional education." The precise academic formulation of "no college system" is: there is no third layer of educational belonging between "the university" and "the department." CUS represents the "university" layer, the Faculties represent the "department" layer, and no "college" is inserted in between.

# "Interdisciplinary" at the undergraduate level is an entire degree: how does the BDSIS (JS3000) operate?

PolyU's institutional response to "interdisciplinary education" is not an interdisciplinary college but a degree programme that lets students assemble their own major: the Bachelor's Degree Scheme in Interdisciplinary Studies (BDSIS). As set out on the PolyU JUPAS admissions page for JS3000, the BDSIS is run by CUS, is UGC-funded, admits roughly 30 students each year (JUPAS and non-JUPAS combined), requires a minimum of four years of study, and sets a credit floor of around 120–150 credits. It is the most concrete expression of "interdisciplinary" at the undergraduate level at PolyU.

The most distinctive feature of the BDSIS is that students "follow a structured interdisciplinary curriculum framework and design their own Major." According to the same admissions page, depending on their interests and career goals, students may graduate with a "BA / BBA / BEng / BSc in Interdisciplinary Studies"—the degree title varies with the interdisciplinary focus area they choose. Within PolyU's degree landscape, which is famous for well-defined professional niches, this is something of an anomaly: the overwhelming majority of PolyU undergraduates enter tightly bounded programmes such as Hotel Management, Nursing, or Building Services Engineering, whereas a BDSIS student enters a nearly blank timetable that they fill in themselves.

On the support side, each BDSIS student is assigned a Personal Academic Mentor, described on the admissions page as "a senior academic in their field of study," who provides guidance on degree planning, focus area, graduation requirements, and course selection. The admissions targeting is unambiguously pitched at high-calibre students: the programme is "specially designed for high-calibre students, including those pursuing Manpower-planned (MPP) programmes." In other words, the BDSIS is not a safety net for students who "don't know what to study." Quite the opposite: it selects for a minority who can handle a high degree of freedom and are willing to self-organise across disciplinary boundaries. Interdisciplinarity here is an elite path, not a universal arrangement.

Structurally, BDSIS students may combine their self-designed Major with a Minor to reinforce the interdisciplinary label. According to CUS programme documents, a Minor requires 18 credits, of which at least 9 credits must be at Level 3 or above; with the approval of the Minor-offering department, up to 6 credits from the Major/GUR (including advanced-level language subjects) may be double-counted towards the Minor. The application normally requires a cumulative GPA of at least 2.5 (actual thresholds depend on the individual Minor). This package—"self-designed Major + structured framework + stackable Minor + one-to-one mentorship"—hands a very large part of the power to define a degree back to the student, within the confines of a four-year, roughly 120–150-credit framework. At a university whose tradition is professional alignment, this is a strikingly rare institutional design.

# How does Broad Discipline admission differ from the BDSIS?

Easily confused with the BDSIS are the Broad Discipline admission schemes that PolyU has been rolling out across several Faculties. Both carry a flavour of "explore first, commit later," but they operate at completely different institutional levels. According to PolyU undergraduate admissions materials and individual Faculty programme pages, a Broad Discipline scheme bundles several Majors within a Faculty into a single JUPAS choice, allowing students to spend a Common Year One exploring before confirming their Major in Year 2. The BDSIS, by contrast, is a standalone degree that cuts across Faculties, and students ultimately graduate with a "Bachelor in Interdisciplinary Studies" rather than a degree from a single department.

For example, according to PolyU Faculty of Science programme materials, all students admitted to the broad-based "BSc (Hons) Scheme" undergo a Common Year One covering foundational subjects in biology, chemistry, mathematics, physics and food science, together with the GUR, allowing them to explore before being streamed into a specific science Major from Year 2. The Faculty of Engineering's broad-discipline grouping offers one JUPAS choice that can lead to up to 14 Majors, while the Faculty of Construction and Environment offers 9. The Faculty of Business has also newly launched a BBA (Hons) Broad Discipline grouping that uses a one-year broad-based curriculum covering core business subjects before students are streamed into an existing BBA Major. The common logic of these groupings is to shift the point of specialisation from entry to a year later, reducing the risk of an eighteen-year-old locking in the wrong path with a single choice.

The key distinction lies in the boundary of exploration. In a Broad Discipline scheme, exploration is locked within a single Faculty—within a science grouping you choose only among the various science departments; within an engineering grouping you choose only among engineering Majors. After a year, you still receive a standard degree from a single department. In the BDSIS, exploration crosses Faculty boundaries, permitting students to assemble subjects from different Faculties into a custom interdisciplinary Major that exists nowhere else, and the degree title explicitly says "in Interdisciplinary Studies." Broad Discipline is therefore a softening of the streaming mechanism, letting students defer the commitment and see more clearly before entering an existing profession. The BDSIS alone is interdisciplinarity in the genuine degree-form sense, allowing students simply not to enter any single existing profession at all. The two are often mentioned together as "explore first, commit later," but they sit on quite separate institutional levels and should not be conflated.

# CUS and CPCE: one word apart, two entirely different logics

The other PolyU unit named "College"—the College of Professional and Continuing Education (CPCE)—has almost no intersection with CUS, yet is frequently mistaken for the same type of entity because of the shared word. According to the CPCE College Overview, CPCE is "a self-financed college of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University," founded in 2002 and outside the UGC-funded sector. It governs two member units: the Hong Kong Community College (HKCC), which provides two-year associate-degree and higher-diploma programmes, and the School of Professional Education and Executive Development (SPEED), which offers top-up degrees and four-year honours bachelor's degrees.

The two Colleges occupy opposite ends of PolyU's educational map, with diametrically opposite logics:

CPCE's "multiple entries and exits" ladder—an HKCC associate-degree graduate can articulate into a SPEED honours degree or apply for senior-year (Year 3) entry at various universities—is aimed at students who did not secure a place in a UGC-funded undergraduate programme first time round. CUS serves students already inside the UGC-funded system, organising their general education and interdisciplinary programmes. One is "internal curriculum coordination" within the funded system; the other is an "external progression pathway" within the self-financing sector. The associate-degree system of CPCE and HKCC, together with its associated controversies, has already been treated in detail in Colleges and Accommodation and will not be elaborated here. The point to stress is simply that CPCE and CUS belong to two entirely separate funding and student-origin systems that do not intersect.

# What about the PolyU Academy for Interdisciplinary Research? Why is it not a "college" for undergraduates?

The last entity likely to get tangled in the discussion is the PolyU Academy for Interdisciplinary Research (PAIR). It carries both "Interdisciplinary" and "Academy," and is easily mistaken for the teaching parent of the BDSIS. According to the PAIR website, however, PAIR is PolyU's central research platform, established in July 2022, bringing together more than 600 senior researchers under twelve Research Institutes and eight Research Centres, and focusing on three overarching themes: Advanced Technologies and Manufacturing, Good Health and Well-being, and Smart and Sustainable Cities. Media reports position PAIR as one of the largest interdisciplinary research platforms in Hong Kong and the Greater Bay Area, with its first director being Chair Professor Chen Qingyan.

PAIR's three themes—Advanced Technologies and Manufacturing, Good Health and Well-being, Smart and Sustainable Cities—have no direct mapping to undergraduate programmes; they are categories of research agenda, not of teaching specialisms. The twelve Research Institutes and eight Research Centres under PAIR pool senior, cross-departmental researchers, and their outputs are papers, patents, and technology transfer, not degrees and credits. Media coverage has portrayed PAIR as one of the largest interdisciplinary research platforms in Hong Kong and the Greater Bay Area—but "largest" here refers to the scale of the research collaboration network, not the number of undergraduates.

The critical distinction is this: PAIR does research, not undergraduate teaching. At the undergraduate level, "interdisciplinary" is carried by the BDSIS under CUS; at the research level, "interdisciplinary" is carried by PAIR. The two share the word interdisciplinary but run on parallel tracks—teaching and research. PAIR awards no undergraduate degrees and offers no GUR general-education courses. Treating PAIR as "PolyU's interdisciplinary college where undergraduates go to study" is another common misreading of the university's architecture. The reason PolyU appears to have "College / Academy" everywhere is precisely that it has used the same vocabulary to name three functions—teaching coordination, continuing education, and research collaboration. The whole exercise of this article is to separate those three layers once again and return each to its proper place.

# Why does PolyU have so many units called "College" / "Academy"?

The profusion of "College / Academy" labels at PolyU is not a naming mess; it is the cumulative result of different functions being set up in different eras, each adopting internationally standard vocabulary. The picture becomes clear when the establishment dates of the three units are placed in the context of PolyU's institutional evolution.

Each of these three strands was prompted by its own external pressures: CPCE was born of Hong Kong's associate-degree policy and the expansion of post-secondary education; OUS / CUS arose from the need to coordinate undergraduate common-core and interdisciplinary studies after the "334" reform; and PAIR was established to serve PolyU's strategic push for higher research rankings and a role as an innovation-and-technology hub in the Greater Bay Area. The three units use the same English terms (College, Academy) because, in international higher-education parlance, those words are generic shells for "academic units" and are by no means exclusive to the college system. The trick to understanding PolyU's structure is to ignore the names and look at the functions: ask who handles UGC-funded undergraduate common-core, who runs self-financing progression, and who does interdisciplinary research, and the answer is immediately clear.

According to the architecture presented on the PolyU education page, the genuine teaching backbone of the university remains the seven Faculties and several Schools. CUS, CPCE, and PAIR are specialised units wrapped around that backbone, handling three horizontal functions: "common-core education," "continuing education," and "interdisciplinary research." They collide orthographically with the "College" of the residential-college system, yet functionally they have nothing whatsoever to do with it. That is precisely why this site insists on labelling PolyU as "no college system / not applicable to this university" in the article Colleges and Accommodation.

# Quick-reference FAQ on common confusions

What follows gathers the most frequent external questions about PolyU's "no college system," "College," and "interdisciplinary" themes into a format that can be cited independently.

Q: Does PolyU have general education?
A: Yes, just not under the name "college general education." PolyU fulfils the general-education function through a single university-wide set of General University Requirements (GUR). Four-year students must complete 30 credits, comprising one subject from each of the four CAR clusters, Chinese and English reading and writing, Service-Learning, and other components. The GUR is coordinated and validated by the College of Undergraduate Studies.

Q: Is PolyU's "College of Undergraduate Studies" a hall or a residential college?
A: No. The College of Undergraduate Studies (CUS) is an academic coordinating body. It provides no residential places and no lifelong membership. It deals with curricula and degrees, not accommodation. PolyU's accommodation is handled by the student halls of residence managed by the Student Affairs Office; see Residential Life at PolyU for details.

Q: Can I design my own major and study an interdisciplinary degree at PolyU?
A: Yes, but places are extremely limited. The Bachelor's Degree Scheme in Interdisciplinary Studies (BDSIS, JS3000) admits roughly 30 students per cohort. Students follow a structured framework to design their own interdisciplinary major and graduate with a Bachelor of Interdisciplinary Studies. It is run by CUS and targets high-calibre students.

Q: Are CPCE and the College of Undergraduate Studies the same thing?
A: No. The College of Professional and Continuing Education (CPCE) is a self-financing affiliated body established in 2002, running associate-degree and top-up degree programmes and not receiving UGC funding. CUS handles UGC-funded regular undergraduates. The two operate on entirely separate funding and student-intake systems.

Q: Is PAIR an interdisciplinary college that undergraduates attend?
A: No. The PolyU Academy for Interdisciplinary Research (PAIR) is a research platform established in 2022, bringing together more than 600 researchers. It does not run undergraduate programmes and does not award undergraduate degrees. Undergraduate interdisciplinarity is delivered by the BDSIS; research interdisciplinarity is delivered by PAIR.