The Academic "College" Examined: The Three-Way Division of Labour Between the College of Undergraduate Studies, the Interdisciplinary Degree, and CPCE

One-sentence conclusion: The Hong Kong Polytechnic University has no collegiate system. Undergraduate common education is coordinated by the College of Undergraduate Studies (elevated in 2025), which oversees a 30-credit General University Requirements programme; interdisciplinary study takes the form of a freestanding degree, BDSIS (JS3000, about 30 students per cohort); and none of this overlaps with the selffinanced CPCE or the research-focused PAIR.

The same English word "College" appears on PolyU's official website with at least three entirely unrelated meanings: one body manages the required common curriculum for all undergraduates, another runs selffinanced associate degrees on the other side of the city, and a third does not teach undergraduates at all—it exists purely for interdisciplinary research. The logic by which CUHK uses its colleges to carry whole-person education finds no equivalent at PolyU: there is no lifelong college membership, no college motto, no college anthem. So how does a university with no collegiate system organise the common education, language training, and interdisciplinary exploration of more than 20,000 undergraduates? This article takes the three units at PolyU that answer to the name "College / 学院", lays them side by side, and maps out their respective remits. It is the academic counterpart to two companion pieces, Colleges and Residence (This University Has No Collegiate System) and A Detailed Look at the Residential System: the first two cover where students "live", this one covers what they "learn".

# How Many Kinds of Units Called "College / 学院" Does PolyU Actually Have?

PolyU's academic skeleton is a two-tier structure of "Faculty + School", diagrammed on the PolyU education page "Faculties, Schools and College"^※. The University has seven Faculties and a number of independent Schools (for example, the School of Design, the School of Fashion and Textiles, and the School of Hotel and Tourism Management). The genuinely confusing part is the three units that all use the word "College" while belonging to completely different systems.

The three share nothing but a name. The College of Undergraduate Studies decides which common courses UGC-funded undergraduates must take before graduation; CPCE runs the self-financed progression ladder for students who did not enter a UGC-funded undergraduate place; PAIR does not even offer courses—it is a collaborative research platform for more than 600 senior researchers. Conflating the three is the single most common mistake outsiders make when reading PolyU's structure, and the rest of this article dismantles each in turn.

# What Is the College of Undergraduate Studies, and Why Was It Elevated in 2025?

The College of Undergraduate Studies (CUS) is the academic unit that coordinates common education for all PolyU undergraduates. It was formerly the Office of Undergraduate Studies (OUS). According to the College of Undergraduate Studies website^※, the College was established in 2025 with the stated aim of fostering "students' academic excellence, innovative spirit and whole-person development through academic programmes, interdisciplinary learning and General University Requirements (GUR)". The one-word promotion from "Office" to "College" lifted what had been a largely administrative body to a level on par with the Faculties, giving it academic-grouping status that directly carries the interdisciplinary degree and the common curriculum.

One clarification is in order: the "College" in the College of Undergraduate Studies is a homonym of the "college" (書院) at CUHK. A CUHK college is a residential college: every undergraduate is a lifelong member of one, and the college carries a portion of general education and whole-person development. PolyU's College of Undergraduate Studies has no residential places and no membership roll; a student "joins" it only as a matter of academic registration, and it confers no lifelong collegial identity. The companion piece Colleges and Residence already made this point from the "living" angle; this article confirms it from the "learning" angle: the College of Undergraduate Studies is a coordinating body for courses and degrees, not a community one can move into or claim allegiance to after graduation.

The upgrade from "Office" to "College" was more than a change of signage. In its OUS incarnation, the unit had been an administrative hub executing academic regulations. As a College, it took on two weightier academic responsibilities: first, it formally absorbed programmes that need to run their own courses and admit their own students, such as the interdisciplinary degree BDSIS; second, in its capacity as a "College", it now sets university-wide curriculum policy for general education and whole-person development, rather than merely executing rules on behalf of other units. The elevation tracks PolyU's recent undergraduate narrative of "whole person + interdisciplinary + social responsibility" — it is the step by which the slogan became an institution.

As for leadership, according to the College's "People" page^※, the current Dean is Prof. Daniel T. L. Shek, who also serves as Associate Vice President (Undergraduate Programme) and Chair Professor of Applied Social Sciences; the Associate Deans are Prof. Juan Chen and Prof. Alan Pak Tao Lau, the latter also being Programme Director of the interdisciplinary degree BDSIS. That the Dean is simultaneously a sitting senior administrator says something about where the College sits in PolyU's governance structure: it is not a marginal academic affairs office but the central body through which the University directly oversees the quality of undergraduate education.

# With No Colleges, Who Runs the Common Curriculum? The 30-Credit GUR Skeleton

In a collegiate university, general education is taught by the colleges and streamed along college lines. At PolyU, which has no colleges, general education is unified into a university-wide set of General University Requirements (GUR), centrally coordinated by the College of Undergraduate Studies. According to the GUR page on the College's website^※, students on the four-year bachelor's degree are required to complete 30 credits of GUR, of which 12 credits come from the Cluster-Area Requirement (CAR). Those 30 credits are PolyU's version of "undergraduate common education" — they stand in for the part that colleges play in a collegiate system.

The four clusters of the Cluster-Area Requirement, applicable to students admitted from 2022/23 onward per the same official page, are:

Four-year students must take at least one 3-credit subject in each of the four clusters, and within them satisfy the Chinese and English reading and writing requirements (CR/CW, ER/EW). This "four clusters + languages" structure is functionally the equivalent of the "breadth of knowledge + communication skills" that college general education provides at CUHK, but it is organised completely differently: at PolyU it is one university-wide curriculum, with subjects opened and accredited centrally by the College of Undergraduate Studies, and students choose by subject code rather than attending classes run by their own college.

It is worth recording how this GUR has expanded in recent years. According to official PolyU guidelines, for four-year students admitted from 2022/23 onward, the GUR added two requirements reflecting contemporary issues: the Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics requirement (AIDA) — to help students "understand the fundamental concepts of AIDA and grasp the basic skills of AIDA technologies and applications" — and the Innovation and Entrepreneurship requirement (GUR-IE), a 1-credit component to be completed in the first year of study. There are also Service-Learning (3 credits), Healthy Lifestyle, and Leadership & Intra-Personal Development components. The GUR is therefore not a static checklist but a rolling curriculum policy that shifts with the University's judgement of what an undergraduate ought to know.

# Where Did the GUR Come From? Why Do All PolyU Undergraduates Take the "Four-Cluster" Curriculum?

To understand the GUR in the hands of the College of Undergraduate Studies, one has to go back to the "334" academic structure reform of Hong Kong higher education in 2012. Before that, Hong Kong bachelor's degrees lasted three years and general education had a limited footprint. From the 2012/13 academic year, the whole territory moved to a four-year structure; the extra year was widely used by institutions to thicken general education and transferable-skills training. PolyU's response was a new four-year curriculum with the GUR codified within it. According to the curriculum framework page on the College's website^※, the four-year curriculum aims to provide students with "a more flexible, student-centred and whole-person professional education". The 30 GUR credits are precisely the institutional expression of the "whole-person / common" layer sitting on top of the "professional education".

So the fact that every PolyU undergraduate must take the four-cluster curriculum is not a departmental preference but a university-wide graduation requirement, centrally managed and accredited by the College of Undergraduate Studies (and its predecessor). This stands in sharp contrast to the collegiate model, where general education is taught by a student's own college: at CUHK, the general education you take may be listed under your college's name; at PolyU, the GUR you take sits on one university-wide curriculum and has nothing to do with which department you read or whether you live in a hall. The absence of a collegiate system does not mean the absence of general education — it simply means the organiser has changed from "college" to "College of Undergraduate Studies".

# Why Is Service-Learning One of PolyU's Calling Cards? The Territory's First Compulsory, Credit-Bearing Requirement

Among the many GUR components, Service-Learning deserves a section of its own, because it carries a "first" label that is rare in Hong Kong and even in Asian higher education. According to the Service-Learning and Leadership Office^※, PolyU was the first university in Hong Kong to make Service-Learning a compulsory, credit-bearing graduation requirement: the four-year curriculum framework approved by the University's Senate in December 2010 stipulated that, from the 2012/13 academic year, students qualifying for graduation must complete one 3-credit Service-Learning subject.

A Service-Learning subject embeds community service in academic study: students apply the professional knowledge learned in class to real social service, with the official description citing the development of problem-solving skills and the awakening of civic awareness and empathy. One operational detail is worth recording — per the same official page, first-year students on the four-year programme may not take a Service-Learning subject in their first semester of enrolment; they must first acquire some academic grounding before engaging in service. This "learn first, serve later" sequencing reflects the University's positioning of Service-Learning as "service with intellectual content" rather than mere voluntary hours. PolyU is known for its applied disciplines — engineering, nursing, rehabilitation sciences — and Service-Learning gives these professional skills an outlet in social application; in a sense it is the concrete embodiment of PolyU's self-image as "professional education + social responsibility".

# Beyond the Required Common Curriculum, What Else Does the College of Undergraduate Studies Offer? Two Interdisciplinary Minors

The College of Undergraduate Studies does more than manage the compulsory GUR: it also offers interdisciplinary Minor programmes of its own, letting students with capacity earn a cross-field label on top of their major. According to the admission requirements page for the Minor in Research and Innovation^※, the College currently offers two Minors:

The threshold for the Minor in Research and Innovation says a great deal about how the College of Undergraduate Studies filters for "interdisciplinary / research-oriented" talent: a hard GPA 3.50 bar, plus the requirement that the student take the initiative to secure a supervisor at Assistant Professor level or above and submit a research proposal — this effectively reserves the path for a small number of high-flyers intent on a research career. It is of a piece with BDSIS's positioning as "designed for high-achieving students": the interdisciplinary and research-oriented training carried by the College of Undergraduate Studies is, on the whole, an elite selection track rather than a universal provision. The universal layer is served by the compulsory GUR; the selective layer is served by BDSIS and these two Minors. The two layers together constitute the College's full functional spectrum of "a common foundation for all, with a sharp peak for the few".

# The Common Curriculum Belongs to the College of Undergraduate Studies, the Major Belongs to the Faculty: How Is a Degree Assembled?

To understand where the College of Undergraduate Studies fits, one also has to see how it divides labour with the Faculties and Schools. A PolyU undergraduate's graduation credits are, roughly, assembled from two blocks: one is the university-wide General University Requirements (GUR), coordinated by the College of Undergraduate Studies; the other is the Discipline-Specific Requirements (DSR) of the student's own department — that is, the "Major" courses, opened and accredited by the Faculty or School to which the department belongs. The former governs "what every PolyU graduate should share in common"; the latter governs "what a nursing / accountancy / building services engineering graduate should know".

This division of labour is the structural signature of a non-collegiate system. In a collegiate university, part of general education is carried by the college, so a student's identity is threefold — belonging to a department, a college, and a hall. At PolyU, general education is uniformly carried by the College of Undergraduate Studies, and a student's academic identity reduces to a single thread — the department (major) — plus one university-wide GUR layer on top. According to the curriculum framework page on the College's website^※, this two-part structure of "professional education + university-wide common requirements" is precisely the skeleton of PolyU's four-year curriculum, with its "student-centred, whole-person professional education" positioning. The accurate academic description of "no colleges" is this: there is no third layer of educational affiliation sitting between "the university" and "the department" — the College of Undergraduate Studies represents the "university" layer, the Faculties represent the "department" layer, and nothing is inserted in between.

# "Interdisciplinary" at PolyU Is a Degree: How Does BDSIS (JS3000) Work?

PolyU's institutional answer to "interdisciplinary education" is not an interdisciplinary college but a degree in which students assemble their own major: the Bachelor's Degree Scheme in Interdisciplinary Studies (BDSIS). According to the PolyU JUPAS admissions page for JS3000^※, BDSIS is offered by the College of Undergraduate Studies, government-funded, with an intake of about 30 students per cohort (JUPAS and non-JUPAS combined), a normal study period of at least four years, and a graduation credit requirement of roughly 120–150 credits. It is the most concrete realisation of the word "interdisciplinary" at PolyU's undergraduate level.

What makes BDSIS distinctive is that students "can design their own Major by following a structured interdisciplinary curriculum framework". According to the same admissions page, students may, following their interests and career goals, graduate with a "BA/BBA/BEng/BSc in Interdisciplinary Studies" — the degree title follows the interdisciplinary focus area chosen. In PolyU's degree landscape, which is built on neatly defined professional pathways, this is an anomaly: the overwhelming majority of PolyU undergraduates enter programmes with clear boundaries — hotel management, nursing, building services engineering — whereas BDSIS students enter a nearly blank curriculum that they fill in themselves.

The supporting apparatus: every BDSIS student is assigned a Personal Academic Mentor, described on the admissions page as "a senior expert in his/her research field", who provides guidance on degree planning, focus area, graduation requirements, and course selection. The admissions positioning is unambiguously aimed at high-fliers: the programme is "designed for high-achieving students, including those from Manpower-planned (MPP) programmes". In other words, BDSIS is not a safety net for students who "don't know what to study". Quite the opposite: it selects for the few who can handle a high degree of freedom and organise themselves across fields. Here, interdisciplinarity is an elite pathway, not a universal provision.

Structurally, BDSIS students can still add a Minor on top of their self-designed Major to strengthen their cross-field profile. According to programme material published by the College, a Minor requires 18 credits, of which at least 9 must be at Level 3 or above; with the approval of the department offering the Minor, students may count up to 6 credits of Major/GUR subjects (including language subjects at advanced level) towards the chosen Minor. Applying for a Minor generally requires a cumulative GPA of 2.5 or above at the time of application (the actual bar varies by Minor). This combination — self-designed Major + structured framework + add-on Minors + one-on-one mentorship — hands the definition of the degree, to a large extent, back to the student within the four-year, roughly 120–150-credit framework. For a university with a tradition of professional streamlining, that is a remarkably rare piece of institutional design.

# What Is the Difference Between Broad Discipline Admission and BDSIS?

Easily confused with BDSIS is the Broad Discipline Scheme that PolyU has rolled out across several Faculties in recent years. Both carry a whiff of "explore first, commit later", but the mechanics operate at entirely different levels. According to the PolyU undergraduate admissions pages^※ and the various Faculty programme pages, Broad Discipline admission packages several Majors within a Faculty into a single admission choice, letting students spend a Common Year One exploring before declaring their Major in Year 2; BDSIS, by contrast, is a freestanding degree that cuts across Faculties, and the student ends up with a "Bachelor of Interdisciplinary Studies" rather than a degree from any single department.

According to Faculty of Science programme materials, all new students in its broad-based "BSc Scheme" take a Common Year One covering foundation subjects in biology, chemistry, mathematics, physics, and food science, alongside the GUR, before streaming into a specific science Major from Year 2. The Faculty of Engineering's broad-based group offers one admission choice covering up to 14 Majors; the Faculty of Construction and Environment covers nine; and the Faculty of Business has added a new BBA (Hons) broad-based group that uses a one-year broad foundation in core business subjects before streaming into an existing BBA Major. The shared logic across these groups is to move the moment of "choosing a major" from matriculation to a year later, reducing the risk that a 17- or 18-year-old makes a once-and-for-all wrong call.

The key difference is the "boundary of exploration". Broad Discipline exploration is locked inside a single Faculty — in the Science group you choose among science departments, in the Engineering group among engineering Majors — and a year later you still hold the conventional degree of a single department. BDSIS exploration crosses Faculty boundaries, allowing subjects from different Faculties to be assembled into a self-defined interdisciplinary Major that does not exist anywhere else, and the final degree title itself says "Interdisciplinary Studies". Broad Discipline is therefore a softening of the streaming mechanism — letting students choose an existing major a little later and a little better informed; BDSIS is interdisciplinary in the full sense of degree structure — letting students decline to enter any single existing major at all. The two are often lumped together as "explore first, commit later", but they sit a whole institutional level apart and should not be conflated.

# The College of Undergraduate Studies and CPCE: One Word Apart, Two Sets of Logic

The other unit at PolyU called a "College" — the College of Professional and Continuing Education (CPCE) — has almost no overlap with the College of Undergraduate Studies, yet because both use the word "College" they are persistently mistaken for the same kind of thing. According to the CPCE college overview^※, CPCE is "a self-financed college of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University", established in 2002 and outside the ambit of UGC funding. It oversees two member units: the Hong Kong Community College (HKCC), which offers two-year associate degrees and higher diplomas, 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 sit at opposite ends of PolyU's educational territory, run on opposite logic:

CPCE's "multiple entries and exits" ladder — HKCC associate degree graduates can top up to a SPEED honours degree, or apply for Year 3 (senior-year) admission at various universities — serves students who did not make it into a UGC-funded undergraduate place in one go. The College of Undergraduate Studies, by contrast, serves students already inside the UGC-funded system, organising their general education and interdisciplinary courses. One is the "internal curriculum coordinator" of the funded system; the other is the "external progression channel" of the self-financed system. CPCE and the associate degree sector more broadly, along with its attendant controversies, are covered at length in Colleges and Residence; this article will not elaborate, beyond stressing that CPCE and the College of Undergraduate Studies belong to two funding and student pipelines that do not cross.

# Then What Is the PolyU Academy for Interdisciplinary Research, and Why Is It Not an "Academy" for Undergraduates?

The last name that tends to get dragged into the confusion is the PolyU Academy for Interdisciplinary Research (PAIR). It carries both "Interdisciplinary" and "Academy" (書院/學院), making it easy to mistake for the teaching home of BDSIS. But according to the PAIR website^※, PAIR is PolyU's central research platform, established in July 2022, bringing together more than 600 senior researchers across twelve Research Institutes and eight Research Centres, focused on three broad directions: Advanced Technology and Manufacturing; Good Health and Well-being; and Smart and Sustainable Cities. According to media reports, PAIR is positioned as one of the largest interdisciplinary research platforms in Hong Kong and the Greater Bay Area, and its first head was Chair Professor Chen Qingyan.

PAIR's three directions — Advanced Technology and Manufacturing, Good Health and Well-being, and Smart and Sustainable Cities — have no direct correspondence with undergraduate programmes. They are categories of research topics, not categories of taught disciplines. The twelve Research Institutes and eight Research Centres bring together senior researchers from across departments, and what they produce is papers, patents, and technology transfer, not degrees and credits. According to media reports, PAIR is positioned as one of the largest interdisciplinary research platforms in Hong Kong and the Greater Bay Area; that "largest" speaks to the scale of the research collaboration network, not to the number of undergraduates.

The decisive distinction is this: PAIR does research, not undergraduate teaching. The "interdisciplinary" at the undergraduate level is carried by BDSIS in the College of Undergraduate Studies; the "interdisciplinary" at the research level is carried by PAIR. The two share the word "interdisciplinary" but run on two parallel tracks, teaching and research; PAIR awards no bachelor's degrees and opens no GUR courses. Reading PAIR as "PolyU's interdisciplinary college, where undergraduates go to study" is another common misreading of the University's structure. The reason PolyU appears to be littered with "Colleges" and "Academies" is precisely that it uses the same vocabulary to name three different functions — teaching coordination, continuing education, and research collaboration. The entire task of this article has been to prise those three layers apart and put each back in its place.

# Why Does PolyU Have So Many Units Called College / Academy?

The proliferation of "College / Academy" names at PolyU is not naming chaos. It is the layering of units founded at different times for different functions, each adopting internationally conventional vocabulary. Put the founding dates of the three units against PolyU's institutional timeline and the picture clears.

Each strand was pushed into being by a different external pressure: CPCE grew out of Hong Kong's associate-degree policy and the expansion of post-secondary education; OUS/CUS came out of the need for undergraduate common curriculum and interdisciplinary training after the "334" reform; PAIR answered PolyU's push up the research rankings and its bid for a role in the Greater Bay Area's innovation-and-technology hub. All three adopted the same English words (College, Academy) simply because, in the international higher-education lexicon, these are generic shells for "an academic unit" — they are not exclusive to the collegiate system. The trick to reading PolyU's structure is to ignore the names and ask what the unit actually does: who runs common curriculum for funded undergraduates, who runs self-financed progression, who does interdisciplinary research — one question and it is immediately clear.

On the PolyU education page^※'s own diagram, the real teaching skeleton remains the seven Faculties and several Schools; the College of Undergraduate Studies, CPCE, and PAIR are specialist units wrapped around that skeleton, handling the three cross-cutting functions of "common education", "continuing education", and "interdisciplinary research" respectively. They collide with the collegiate system's "college" in name only, and share not a single function with it — which is precisely why this site insists, in Colleges and Residence, on labelling PolyU "no collegiate system / not applicable".

# Frequently Asked Questions on Common Confusions

Below, the most common external questions about PolyU's "no collegiate system", its "Colleges", and its "interdisciplinary" offerings are answered in standalone form.

Q: Does The Hong Kong Polytechnic University have general education? Yes — it is just not called "college general education". PolyU discharges the general-education function through a university-wide set of General University Requirements (GUR). Four-year students must complete 30 credits, including one subject in each of the four Cluster-Area Requirement (CAR) categories, Chinese and English reading and writing requirements, and Service-Learning, all coordinated and accredited by the College of Undergraduate Studies.

Q: Is PolyU's "College of Undergraduate Studies" a hall of residence or a college? No. The College of Undergraduate Studies is an academic grouping. It has no residential places and confers no lifelong college membership; it manages courses and degrees, not accommodation. Residential life at PolyU is handled by student hostels administered by the Office of Student Affairs; see The Residential System.

Q: Can I design my own major and read an interdisciplinary degree at PolyU? Yes, but places are extremely limited. The Bachelor's Degree Scheme in Interdisciplinary Studies (BDSIS, JS3000) admits about 30 students per cohort. Students follow a structured framework to design their own interdisciplinary Major and graduate with a Bachelor of Interdisciplinary Studies; the programme is run by the College of Undergraduate Studies and is aimed at high-achieving students.

Q: Are CPCE and the College of Undergraduate Studies the same thing? No. The College of Professional and Continuing Education (CPCE) is a self-financed subsidiary established in 2002, offering associate degrees and top-up degrees outside UGC funding. The College of Undergraduate Studies serves UGC-funded regular undergraduates. Their funding and student pipelines are completely separate.

Q: Is PAIR an interdisciplinary college that undergraduates go to? No. The PolyU Academy for Interdisciplinary Research (PAIR) is a research platform established in 2022, bringing together more than 600 researchers. It offers no undergraduate courses and awards no bachelor's degrees. Interdisciplinarity at the undergraduate level is carried by BDSIS; interdisciplinarity at the research level is carried by PAIR.