Sometimes I'm almost tempted to say a university education is overrated, job-wise. These days, too many locals still cling onto this notion that so long as they manage to get a university place and graduate then they can enjoy the "good life" with a high paying job, family security and access to the luxury goods. Maybe that was true 30+ years ago when university education really was accessible only to the elite of the elite in HK, but nowadays, even with stiff competition, there are no shortages of university graduates. A university graduate in HK nowis nothing special, many in fact end up earning the min. wage doing some menial task because they could'nt land their "ideal" job.
Thus the bigger problem is whether the skills of those graduates fit the market needs, and I suspect not, or not really well. There are cases where some locals chose to forgo a university place and went into the vocational training routine and end up landing a better job on graduation with better pay and career prospects than many university graduates. Unless you go into a professional route (i.e. medicine, law, engineering) or some promising fields career-wise, a grad with a liberal arts degree (i.e. English lit) is not going to find an easy time in the job market.