Ask Hebei Normal University of Science and Technology what it researches and the list reads like a county agricultural fair: a chestnut research center, a wine industry college, a germplasm platform for farm animals, and twelve national science-and-technology backyards where faculty and students work beside farmers. The same university trains schoolteachers. Agriculture and teaching are the two strands of this institution, braided together since 1941, when a junior agricultural vocational school opened in nearby Tangshan.
The two lines met early. The Tangshan school became a branch of North China Agricultural University in 1975, then split off in 1985 as a college for agricultural teachers, making it the first institution in China to train teachers specifically for agricultural vocational education. Mergers followed over the decades, and in 2003 the school took its present name; it gained master’s-degree awarding rights in 2006 and was approved in 2024 as a doctorate-granting cultivation unit. Its three campuses spread across Qinhuangdao, Changli and a development zone.
Seventy-seven undergraduate programs and seven master’s-level disciplines, among them biology, horticulture, food science, animal husbandry, education and marine science, serve roughly 20,000 undergraduates and 1,100 postgraduates. Twenty-six programs train teachers, and the campus of 950,000 square meters, about 95 hectares, houses a national college for wine-industry talent, a provincial one for sweet potatoes, an education-ministry engineering research center for chestnuts, six provincial key laboratories and the twelve backyards in farm communities.
Institutional strength follows the same dual path: the ministry named it among the first key bases for training vocational-education teachers, while its science-technology backyards and marine research answer the needs of Qinhuangdao’s farming and coastal economies. A faculty of more than 1,600, including over 1,200 full-time teachers, links the school to universities in over 30 countries, with an Italian language training and testing center on campus.
Few institutions carry a plow and a blackboard with equal seriousness. At Hebei Normal University of Science and Technology, teaching the people who grow the food and teaching the people who teach them have never been separate jobs.
Data Source: HEVTT Official Website (as of 2024)
