Hefei Normal University was a school for teachers before it was a university, and it still measures itself partly in teachers: over the decades it has trained more than 200,000 school principals and teachers, alongside the near 100,000 graduates of its degree programs. Founded in 1955 as the Anhui Institute of Education and rebuilt as a full undergraduate university in 2007, it keeps the educator’s tradition alive through a trademark project in which its students run village schools every summer.
Its three campuses, Jinxiu, Binhu and Sanxiaokou, cover 1,295 mu, some 86 hectares, in the provincial capital. The school is now a master’s-degree awarding institution, one of the first universities chosen for the national excellent-teacher training program, and a member of the province’s first batch of application-oriented high-level universities.
Eighteen colleges and schools, nine of them engineering colleges, offer 50 undergraduate programs, with three professional master’s categories spanning 21 fields and 23 national and provincial first-class programs. Some 23,000 students, including postgraduates and international students, are taught by a faculty of 1,200, of whom 426 hold doctorates; admission scores in 2025 ran 47 to 50 points above the provincial cutoff.
A signature Xingzhi culture, named for the educator Tao Xingzhi, is built around his philosophy of loving students and uniting knowledge with action. The Anhui Tao Xingzhi research society is based here, and the school’s double-hundred plan sends teachers into a hundred enterprises and students out to run a hundred village Xingzhi schools, a project that has won national honors for campus culture and volunteer service.
Research spans psychology, electronics and the region’s industries, from a provincial key laboratory for adolescent mental health to a base preserving the region’s traditional woodblock prints. The school has led 71 national fund projects and holds 362 patents, and its students have won three golds at the Chengdu World University Games and two at the Hangzhou Asian Games. Ninety-four percent of recent graduates find work.
Abroad, the school runs a cooperative program with a partner university in Ireland, exchange schemes with Spanish universities, and exchanges with universities in Taiwan and the Education University of Hong Kong, while international students have been enrolled since 2022. From an educators’ institute of 1955 to a university that still sends its students to teach in village classrooms, Hefei Normal has stayed faithful to its first calling: making teachers who make schools.
Data Source: HFNU Official Website (as of 2026)
