The University of Hong Kong (HKU) on Thursday said it will continue to work on increasing the diversity of its students and enhancing the balance of students from different countries.

The university said there were about 1,200 newly admitted non-local students this year, higher than the 900 recorded last year. About half of the non-local students were from the mainland.

Professor Bennett Yim, director of undergraduate admissions and international student exchange, said there were fewer applications from Europe and North America than other regions.

"Mainland students, being much closer to Hong Kong, they will have a much better understanding of the University of Hong Kong, [about] what we can offer. I think it's not surprising to see that quite a lot of our students are actually coming from mainland China," he said.

"Our goal is always to continue to increase the diversity. And so right now, we are putting a lot of effort, going to everywhere in the world to try to promote Hong Kong."

Asked about instances of students securing their admission to HKU with fake degrees, vice-president Ian Holliday said he is not worried that similar situations will happen again.

"We now have very robust procedures for identifying fake qualifications. We know what to look for in URLs. We know what to look for in terms of certificates that are sent to us," he said.

"We have a team of kind of forensic experts who are confident in unearthing any of the questionable qualifications that we receive. We feel that every student that we ultimately do admit to HKU does merit, does deserve a place here."