More than 400 parents of high school juniors attended the consultation meeting of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University for prospective students on Sunday.

With only 400 seats in the lecture room of the Beijing Institute of Technology where the meeting was held, some parents were asked to stand in the far recesses of the hall and even on the stairs.

The university aims to recruit 230 students from the mainland in 2010, said Laura Lo, director of Chinese Mainland Affairs in the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, adding that it typically receives as many as 4,000 applications each year.