Beijing Jiaotong University — guide for international students

Beijing Jiaotong University (北京交通大学, BJTU) was founded in 1896, when the Qing government’s Postal Department established the Railway Management Institute in Beijing — the university describes it as the first specialised institution in China for training management talent, and the country’s first school of railway management. In 1921 it merged with the technical schools at Shanghai and Tangshan to form National Jiaotong University; after the 1923 reorganisation the Beijing school carried the Beijing Jiaotong University name. In 1950 it was renamed Northern Jiaotong University, with the bridge engineer Mao Yisheng as its president, and in 2003 it took its present name after merging with Beijing Electric Power College. Older material still uses the Northern Jiaotong name, so do not be surprised to meet it.

BJTU is not a single-site university, and that matters for international applicants because the three sites are in different provinces and are priced differently. The main campus is in Haidian District, Beijing, split into an East and a West campus; the Weihai campus sits on the Shandong coast and is built around Chinese-foreign cooperative education; a research institute operates at Tangshan in Hebei, where the university’s preparatory program is taught; and a new campus is being built at Xiong’an in Hebei, with further research bases at Huanghua, Shenzhen and in the Yangtze River Delta. The international-student admission guide quotes separate dormitory rates for the Beijing, Weihai and Tangshan sites, so check which one your program belongs to before you budget.

As of 31 August 2025 the university’s own basic-data page counts 21 schools, 83 undergraduate majors, 17,082 undergraduates, 12,051 master’s students, 4,138 doctoral students and 621 international degree students, taught by 2,136 full-time faculty of whom 1,499 hold senior professional titles. Two official pages count academicians differently — the Chinese basic-data page records 1 member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and 2 of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, while the English Statistics page (which is visibly out of date elsewhere, listing 18 schools and 655 international students) gives 3 and 10. The Chinese university profile adds that BJTU passed China’s international-student education quality certification at A grade and was given the longest available validity, eight years, and that more than 2,000 international students are on its books; the international admission brochure records over 2,200 international students from more than 120 countries in 2019. The 621 figure in the quick facts is the narrower one — degree students only.

BJTU admits international students to bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees and to a range of non-degree programs, and applications are made online through the university’s international student service system at study.bjtu.edu.cn, with notices published on the admissions portal at bjtu.17gz.org. Two things set its admission apart. The first is the CSCA: an official BJTU notice states that, starting with the 2026–27 academic year, all international students applying for undergraduate degree programs — self-funded applicants and applicants for every scholarship program alike — must take the China Scholastic Competency Assessment and submit the score report with their application. Every undergraduate candidate takes Chinese and Mathematics; science and engineering majors take Physics as well, while management and humanities majors need only the two. The first sitting was on 21 December 2025, with registration opening in November 2025, and from 2026 the test runs five times a year, in January, March, April, June and December; the exam’s own site is www.csca.cn. The second is procedural and easy to miss: the admission guide tells applicants to add the admissions WeChat account (18515990275) quoting their application number, and states that failing to do so means being treated as having given up the interview. Applications run in two rounds each cycle, 15 January to 15 March and 16 March to 30 June, and the application fee — RMB 500 at undergraduate level, RMB 600 for graduate programs — has to be paid before an application counts as valid. Note that the year-specific brochure for each cycle is published by the College of International Education on cie.bjtu.edu.cn; the university announced its 2026 international student admission brochure there on 1 November 2025. The figures below come from BJTU’s own international student admission brochure and from the university’s 2026 published fee schedule — confirm the current cycle’s dates against the College’s brochure before you apply.

Degree programs

Select a degree level to see tuition, duration and entry requirements.

Non-degree programs

Documents to prepare

Application timeline

These are the dates Beijing Jiaotong University published for the 2026 intake. That cycle has closed. Use them as a guide to when each step falls in the year, and check the official pages for the 2027 dates before you plan around them.

BJTU’s funding comes from four sources, and they are applied for in different places — this is the part applicants most often get wrong. Chinese Government Scholarship Bilateral Program applicants apply through the dispatching authority in their own country and take their deadline from the Chinese embassy there; the Silk Road, High-Level Graduate and China-Africa Friendship channels are applied for through BJTU, but close earlier than ordinary admission — 5 May for the second round, and 28 February 2026 for the High-Level Graduate Program. The Ministry of Commerce scholarship is applied for through the economic and commercial office of the Chinese embassy or consulate in your country and is aimed at working professionals rather than fresh graduates. The Confucius Institute scholarship (now the International Chinese Language Teachers Scholarship) is applied for in its own online system through a Confucius Institute or Chinese embassy. Only the Beijing Municipal and BJTU awards are decided inside the university. One detail worth planning around: for Chinese-taught programs the Chinese Government Scholarship channels ask for HSK 5, but the brochure states that an applicant who is awarded a scholarship without meeting HSK 5 can be given a year of Chinese language study first — so the language bar is not automatically the end of a scholarship application.

BJTU’s research is organised around rail transport and the technologies that keep it running: train control and communication, intelligent and autonomous rail transit, electrical traction, structural and geotechnical engineering for railways, logistics and systems science, and increasingly information technology and computer science around them. The university profile counts 94 research platforms at provincial level and above, of which 9 are national-level — including a frontier science centre for smart high-speed railway systems and a collaborative innovation centre for rail transit safety — and 85 are provincial or ministerial. The basic-data page, updated to 31 August 2025, counts these differently at 81 platforms above provincial level, with 1 national key laboratory, 2 national engineering research centres and 17 post-doctoral research stations; the English research pages give yet another breakdown of more than 70 platforms. Both official counts are cited below, and neither page states which supersedes the other. On output, the English research overview records 10 national-level and 142 provincial-level awards over five years, among them one first prize and two second prizes of the National Science and Technology Progress Award and two second prizes of the State Technological Invention Award, and names BJTU a National Intellectual Property Demonstration University.

Two official BJTU pages count its partnerships differently, and the gap is large enough to be worth knowing before you quote a figure: the Chinese university profile states cooperation with 320 universities and institutions in 57 countries and regions, while the International Office’s own site states cooperative relationships with 200 renowned universities across five continents. Both are cited below. The distinctive part of BJTU’s international work is that it is built around railways rather than around general exchange: the university initiated the Global University Alliance for Sustainable Transportation, is a coordinating member of the China-Russia Transport University Presidents Alliance, the China-ASEAN Rail Education Training Alliance and the UIC high-speed railway universities alliance, and has set up joint high-speed rail research centres with the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom and Indonesia. It also runs Confucius Institutes at Campinas in Brazil and Leuven in Belgium. In 2019 the university hosted over 2,200 international students from more than 120 countries; the current profile states more than 2,000, and the basic-data page counts 621 of them as degree students.

BJTU sits unusually close to one industry, and its graduate destinations show it. The university’s employment quality report for the class of 2024 records an overall graduation destination rate of 94.82% as of 31 August 2024 — 93.88% for bachelor’s graduates, 96.06% for master’s and 95.63% for doctoral. Of that cohort, 36.71% went on to further study (28.39% in China, 8.32% abroad) and 52.96% went into employment. The largest single employer was China State Railway Group, which took 395 graduates, followed by State Grid with 163, CRRC with 102, China Mobile with 84 and China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation with 75; Huawei and BYD also appear among the major recruiters. By industry, information technology took the largest share of research-degree graduates at 23.97%, ahead of manufacturing at 15.57%, transport at 14.45% and finance at 9.47%, and 53.43% of placements were in Beijing. Read those numbers for what they are: this report covers the whole graduating class, which is overwhelmingly domestic, and BJTU does not publish separate placement or salary statistics for its international graduates — so treat any international-cohort employment figure you see elsewhere as unsourced, and ask the College of International Education what support is available for your own visa situation.

Where you live at BJTU depends on which site your program belongs to, and the difference in cost is substantial. The international student admission brochure prices the Beijing dormitories at RMB 14,400–21,600 per person per year for a double or triple room, against RMB 3,600 at Weihai and RMB 5,000 at Tangshan. The university’s 2026 published fee schedule states the current rate differently, as a daily one: RMB 45–66 per bed per day for self-funded international students, with a separate RMB 32 per bed per day for self-funded international undergraduates in the Chinese-foreign cooperative programs at Weihai (Apartment No. 1). The daily figures are the newer of the two, so use those for budgeting and confirm the exact room rate with the College of International Education when you are assigned. Rooms come with a single bed and bedding, a desk and shelf and a wardrobe, air conditioning, a telephone, a television and wireless internet, with a shared kitchen, laundry, shower and toilet. The Beijing campus itself is a self-contained piece of Haidian, with a hospital, stadium, swimming pools, a gym, an arboretum, a museum and an art gallery — and, fitting for a railway university, its own rail line.

Accommodation

Dining

BJTU does not publish canteen locations, opening hours or meal prices for international students on its English-language pages, so budget for food separately and check on arrival. What the admission brochure does specify is that the international student dormitories have a shared kitchen along with laundry, shower and toilet facilities, so self-catering is a realistic option on every campus.

Facilities

Reach the College of International Education, Beijing Jiaotong University (admissions and international student affairs) for questions about applications, documents, scholarships and arrival. Type university programs and offices are based on campus in Beijing.