What I Learned Sending My Child to University in China: A Parent’s Real Experience
September, 2021, humidity sticking my shirt to my back, hauling a 10-liter rice cooker up five flights of stairs at my daughter’s Shanghai university dorm. The building’s only elevator had been broken for three days, and my daughter was two steps ahead of me, dragging a storage bin full of snacks and skincare, huffing that I should have left the cooker at home. “The rule says no high-power appliances,” I puffed, grabbing the handrail. “What if they confiscate it?” She turned around, grinning, and gestured to the door of her dorm, where a hot pot electric stove and a mini fridge were already sitting by the threshold. “All the roommates brought theirs. RA only checks if someone leaves it on and burns the toast down. Relax.”
My daughter grew up in Vancouver, we moved back to Shanghai when she was 16 for my job, and when it came time to pick university, she surprised me by turning down her offers from Canadian schools to stay here. All the comments from our friends back home started immediately: “Isn’t Chinese university just all rote memorization and terrible pressure?” “Will she even get a degree that’s recognized overseas?” I had the same questions. I went to university in China in the 90s, and my experience was nothing if not rigid. I expected her to hate it, to be calling me every other week begging to transfer.
Three months in, she did call me, upset. She’d failed her first compulsory politics midterm. She’d written the exam the way she’d written essays in international high school, offering her own opinions and tying in outside readings, and the professor marked her down 30 points for not sticking to the key points outlined in the textbook. That was the first wake-up call, the part no one tells you about when you’re applying: a lot of core classes do rely on memorization, and if you’re coming from a Western curriculum, you don’t know that unwritten rule. We didn’t do anything fancy: I helped her make flashcards of all the key terms for the make-up exam, she joined a WeChat study group with three other classmates who’d also messed up the first test, and she walked out with a B+. That’s the thing: it’s not that the system is impossible to navigate, you just have to learn the rules that no one puts in the admissions brochure.
A semester later, she came home for Sunday dinner and told me about her media studies final project. She and three teammates spent 12 weeks hanging out in the old city, filming street food vendors who were facing eviction to make way for a new shopping mall. The original assignment was a 15-page research paper, but when they asked their professor if they could turn in a 30-minute documentary instead, he said yes, and even helped them get access to the community office to interview the district manager. That’s when I realized how much Chinese universities have changed since I was a student. It’s not all memorization. The upper-level major classes are often far more hands-on than I expected, especially for applied fields like media, business, or engineering. A lot of professors have side careers in the industry, so they can connect students to internships before they even start looking for work. My daughter already has a part-time internship at a local short-video company, and she’s only a junior.
When other expat or Chinese parents with international school kids ask me if they should consider sending their kid to a Chinese university, I don’t give them a yes or no. I give them three concrete things to do first. First, visit the campus in off-peak season, not just the open house when everything is polished. Sit in on one or two regular classes for the major your kid wants, not the demo classes they reserve for prospective students. That will tell you more about the teaching style than any website. Second, message 2 or 3 current students on Xiaohongshu or the university’s student forum who have similar backgrounds to your kid. Ask them specific questions: How often do professors return emails? Do you actually get to switch majors if you hate your first one? Is the dorm quiet enough to study in at night? Generic guidebooks won’t answer those. Third, if your kid does enroll, help them set aside a small block of time every week for whatever independent project they care about outside of class requirements. My daughter does a small TikTok channel about campus food, and even during midterm week, she keeps that 2 hours on Saturday to film and edit. It gives her an outlet when the required memorization feels draining.
It’s not all positive, of course. My daughter still complains about the 8am general ed classes she has to sit through twice a week, even if they have nothing to do with her major. She’s told me how much unspoken pressure there is on her classmates to pick a “stable” job after graduation—half the cohort is already studying for the civil service exam a year and a half before graduation, even if they don’t actually want to work in government. The dorms are cramped, she shares a bathroom with 12 other people on her floor, and the lunch line at the main cafeteria is regularly 20 minutes long.
Last weekend, I met her on campus, we got jianbing from the old vendor outside the south gate and sat on the lawn by the lake. She ranted about a group project where one teammate did half the work but expected the same grade, a common problem anywhere, but framed by the local norm of not wanting to rock the boat by calling him out. I still have days where I wonder if she’d have less pressure if we’d sent her back to Canada. She still has days where she’s frustrated by the rules that feel unnecessary. But last month, she sent me a video from their dorm: it was Mid-Autumn Festival, she and her three roommates were baking mooncakes, flour all over their cheeks, hanging paper lanterns they’d cut themselves from construction paper. One of her roommates grew up in a small village in Guizhou, had never left the province before coming to university, and they’re planning a road trip around Yunnan this winter break.
That’s the part I never expected. It’s not the perfect, global education some universities market, and it’s not the rigid pressure cooker that people who’ve never been love to stereotype. It’s messy, it has annoying rules, it has more surprises than I ever counted on. It’s just her education, right where she wants it. We’ll see how it goes.
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