What It’s Really Like Attending University in China: A Parent’s Honest Perspective
It’s 10 PM Beijing time, 10 AM where I live in Vancouver, and my son’s face pops up on our WeChat call. Half his hair sticks up from a post-lab nap, a half-eaten scallion bing sits on his desk out of frame, and his bed behind him is strung with fairy lights his roommate brought from home. He just finished his first year studying computer science at a top public university in eastern China, and when I asked what he wanted me to tell other parents considering sending their kids there, he laughed and said, “Tell them I actually have to go to class. No skipping to nap like all the YouTubers say Western unis are like.”
I grew up in northern China, moved to Canada when my son was 10, so when he told me sophomore year of high school he wanted to go back for university, I had a lot of the same worries most outside parents would. I remembered my own college days there: rigid schedules, rote memorization, nonstop pressure to perform that left me burnt out my second year. I’d also read all the thinkpieces that still paint Chinese university education as nothing more than an extension of gaokao cram schooling. I tried to talk him into applying to local schools here, but he was set: tuition was a quarter of what it is here, the CS program was ranked higher than most Canadian unis, and he wanted the chance to build connections in the booming Chinese tech industry.
The first month, he called me complaining about the 6:45 AM mandatory morning self-study. All first-year undergrads at his school have to attend, you swipe your student ID to prove you’re there, and if you miss more than three, it hits your final grade. He also had mandatory PE three times a week until 7 PM, and 18 credit hours of classes a semester – that’s almost 50% more than the average full-time course load here. Dorms were another shock: four guys to a 12×15 foot room, shared bathrooms down the hall, no AC the first two weeks before the campus turned it on for summer. He said he lost three pounds sweating through the first round of midterms. I panicked the first time he told me that, asked if he wanted to come back and transfer. He just laughed and said everyone was in the same boat, they’d all bought portable fans and camped out in the library basement to study.
Two months in, he called me upset after his first coding midterm. He’d never gotten below a B in any class here, and he got a 52. The class average was 41, the professor curved everyone up 15 points, but he was still shaken. I expected him to say the professor was unfair, or the test was just a trick. Instead, he told me what the professor said at the next lecture: “You all got good enough grades on the gaokao to get here, but that means you memorized how to solve problems someone else wrote. Here, you have to build something new, and that means failing first. I don’t expect any of you to be perfect on the first try.” That professor held extra office hours every night that week, recorded all his extra review sessions and put them on the school’s learning platform for free, and even gave extra practice problems that didn’t count for grade just to help people catch up. That’s when I realized how much things had changed since I was in college.
A lot of parents ask me now if it’s true that Chinese unis are still all rote learning. From what I’ve seen, that’s an outdated stereotype, at least for top programs. My son had three group projects first year that required original work: his product design project had them build a working prototype of a portable water filter for rural villages, they got a 5000 yuan grant from the school to test it, and they’re presenting it at a national student competition this fall. The makerspace on campus is open 24/7, any student can use the equipment for free for class projects or personal ideas. That’s nothing like what I had when I was an undergrad there 25 years ago.
But that doesn’t mean it’s all easy, and there are concrete small things parents can do to prep if your kid is going. First, if they’ve never shared a bedroom before, do a low-stakes trial run a few months before they leave: have them share a space with a sibling or cousin for a week, and help them pick up small things that make shared living easier: good noise-canceling headphones, a portable mini fridge for their desk, blackout curtains for their bed. My son says those three things are the only reason he gets enough sleep most nights, with one roommate pulling all-nighters coding and another going to bed at 9:30 PM every night. Second, be prepared for the workload: they won’t have as much free time for part-time work or travel their first two years as they would at a Western uni, so don’t push them to take on extra commitments right away. Third, if they’re worried about pressure (and most will be, because the competition for internships and grad school starts really early), help them map out a basic timeline the summer before they start, instead of waiting until midterms to figure out what they need to do next. My son mapped out his internship search for next summer during his first semester break, and that cut down on a lot of his unnecessary anxiety.
There are still things that worry me. Half of his classmates are already studying for the national postgraduate entrance exam, even though they’re only rising sophomores. The pressure to get a top job at a big tech company right after graduation is constant, and I still see him pulling all-nighters that leave him exhausted for days. It’s not the low-pressure experience some people seek out in Western unis, and it’s not for everyone. But it’s also not the rigid, uncreative system I remembered. He chose this, he’s learning more than I think he would have here, and he’s already got opportunities most new undergrads his age would envy. We’re just taking it one semester at a time, and so far, that’s working out.
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