Generally, Hong Kong students and their parents have several misconceptions or blind spots regarding further education.

Firstly, purely from the admission ratio, top universities in the U.S. such as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton are much harder to get into than Oxford and Cambridge (Oxbridge) in the U.K. Oxbridge admits about 8,000 students per year combined, while Harvard, Yale, and Princeton admit only about 4,000 students per year combined, with the U.S. population being five times that of the U.K. By this reasoning, due to the much larger population, far more intense competition, and fewer admissions per institution, the difficulty of getting into Oxbridge is roughly equivalent to getting into the top 20 universities in the U.S. However, universities like the University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania, which are among the top 20 in the U.S., though also prestigious, do not have as good a reputation as Oxbridge in the eyes of most Hong Kong students and parents; let alone the less known Duke University and Washington University in St. Louis among the top 20.