Where the Jobs Are

Psst. Looking for an academic job? Move to Hong Kong. According to an article in the latest issue of The Chronicle, universities in the Chinese territory are aggressively hiring professors in a push to raise their academic profile:

[Hong Kong] is refashioning its higher-education system from the British three-year model into a four-year system aligned with those of the United States and mainland China; the change becomes effective in 2012.

The overhaul includes pumping millions of dollars into research, retooling undergraduate curricula to inspire creative thinking, and hiring more professors: around 1,000 in all.

Hong Kong universities are hoping to capitalize on the fact that many American universities aren’t hiring right now, Andrej Bogdanov, told The Chronicle. Mr. Bogdanov is a computer scientist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong — and a transplant from the U.S.:

While American computer-science departments were cutting back, Chinese University “had a lot of plans for the future,” he says. “They are trying to take advantage of the crisis in the U.S. and Europe and bring other people.”

Way Kuo, president of the City University of Hong Kong, who himself was hired last fall from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, where he was dean of the College of Engineering, agreed:

“We want to recruit aggressively right away,” [he] says. “We’d like to recruit a lot of people from America.”

Mr. Kuo hopes to hire 200 new faculty members, most of whom will be in a position to earn the equivalent of tenure.

Other universities on a major hiring spree include: the Chinese University, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, the University of Hong Kong, and Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

Still have doubts about moving overseas? Consider this: many Hong Kong universities are matching American salaries: “A junior faculty member in computer science at the University of Science and Technology, for example, makes about $119,000,” The Chronicle notes.