Peking University Tells Incoming Professional Master's Students It Can't House Them All. What Happened?

The reason is unclear — and no one is sure what they are even entitled to know.

On the afternoon of July 27, Pan Mingbo, an incoming 2018 Juris Master's student at Peking University, got a text from his school. The university's relevant departments had notified it, the message said, that "significant changes have occurred in the housing bed resources for 2018 professional master's students across the university. For 2018 professional master's students who applied to live in Wanliu Apartments, the university cannot meet all housing needs, and the shortfall is substantial (beds are currently being allocated at 55% of the number of admitted students)."

The message left Pan Mingbo anxious. He comes from a poor family and already had a job, but he still wanted to study at Peking University. By scrimping and saving — and by getting in — he could just barely put together the 22,000 yuan a year that Peking University charges for its Juris Master's program, nearly three times the 8,000 yuan a year for an academic master's.

The "professional master's" is a degree category with Chinese characteristics, created to train applied, profession-oriented graduates, as opposed to the academic master's. Under a Ministry of Education plan, professional master's programs began admitting fresh graduates in 2009.

The one consolation was supposed to be housing. Before applying, the first thing Pan Mingbo checked was whether Juris Master's students got a bed. The law school's admissions brochure, which came with his acceptance letter, said: "Full-time Juris Master's students may apply to live in Peking University's Wanliu Student Apartments," at an annual housing fee of just 1,500 yuan. Questions on online forums, replies from Peking University faculty, and accounts from upperclassmen in the incoming-student group chat all confirmed it again and again.

Now that might fall through too.

Wanliu Apartments sits 4.5 kilometers from Peking University's main Yanyuan campus: 100,000 square meters of floor area, 1,576 units, most of them shared four to a room. Peking University has five residential areas. Undergraduates and academic master's students live in Yanbeiyuan, doctoral students in Changchun Xinyuan, international students in Zhongguan Xinyuan, visiting scholars in Yuanmingyuan. After the nationwide expansion of master's enrollment in 2009, Wanliu became where the university's professional master's students gathered — even though the Peking University Graduate Admissions Brochure states plainly: "The university does not arrange housing for professional degree graduate students, or for academic-track graduate students whose personnel files are not transferred to the university."

Pan Mingbo went online to look at rentals near Peking University. A bunk near Liudaokou subway station, five kilometers from his school, cost at least 900 yuan a month — seven times what Wanliu costs. In the incoming-student group chat, someone got a call from an agent who had heard the news: one-bedroom apartments near campus started at 3,000 yuan a month, or 36,000 yuan a year, 24 times the Wanliu rate.

"My first reaction was that I didn't want to go to school anymore. Then I decided I should fight for a bed instead," Pan Mingbo told QDaily.

1. "The university has already made great efforts. We hope everyone can understand."

Pan Mingbo and his classmates were neither the first nor the last to get such a text. On July 11, incoming 2018 creative writing master's students in the Chinese department were told the university would no longer provide housing, and had already written a joint letter to the school.

On the afternoon of July 26, a professional master's housing allocation table turned up in a WeChat group. It listed the number of incoming students in 16 departments (1,145) and the share of beds that could be provided (55%) — 636 beds in all, that last figure highlighted in yellow. It left 509 students out of Wanliu, a shortfall of 127 rooms at four students a room.

With no official notice, few incoming law students took the table seriously at the time. But the news moved quickly from department to department.

Incoming sociology students were the first to get a text, at 11 a.m. on July 27, saying "a lottery plan is being drawn up." At 4 p.m., the law school — Pan Mingbo's department — was the second to hear. At 7 p.m., the School of Mathematics was told that housing would be assigned by a mixed lottery at the 55% ratio: "Students who don't get a spot should start looking for a place as soon as possible — at least you'll have a head start on students in most other departments." At 10 p.m., incoming students in the School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences got a plan of their own: a lottery run through WeChat "lucky money" red envelopes, with housing rotating over three years.

By incomplete count, among the departments that sent notices, only the law school's admissions brochure said outright that students "may apply to live in Wanliu." Other departments had no written rule, but most had a tradition of housing everyone there.

The law school's 292 incoming professional master's students quickly agreed in a WeChat group to write a joint letter to the university president and the dean asking for beds. The letter was finished at 3 a.m. on July 28, under the title "A Letter to the University from Peking University's 2018 Juris Master's Students Regarding the Housing Issue." It gave five reasons the university should solve the problem: their reasonable reliance on the law school's admissions brochure and their acceptance letters; the difficulty of finding housing on their own; the safety risks of living scattered off campus; the principle that students should not bear the cost of the university's own mistake; and their wish to put more energy into studying. They also asked the university to explain why the law school had enough rooms in past years and suddenly fell far short this one.

At 9:55 a.m. on July 28, they posted the letter at once to Peking University's Weiming BBS, Weibo, Zhihu and other platforms, hoping to draw attention. That same day, a Juris Master's student from the 2016 cohort set up a temporary group chat to work on the housing problem. As of publication, 157 students from different departments had joined it.

Also that day, an article titled "To Stay at Peking University, I May Have to Spend 200,000 Yuan" went out on the WeChat official account "Fat Sociology" and quickly passed 100,000 views. One of its authors was Xi Ying, an incoming 2018 professional master's student in the Chinese department. Speaking to Caixin, Xi Ying said what disappointed her most was how late the university made its decision: "During admissions they said nothing about there being no dorms, then changed their minds at the last minute, right before the semester, after so many professional master's students had their acceptance letters and were waiting to enroll in September."

The Beijing News, Phoenix Weekly and other outlets reported the students' demands the same day. At 7:30 p.m. on July 28, Peking University's Student Apartment Service Center replied to the law school's joint letter on Weiming BBS, saying it "would resolve the housing issue for students unable to live at Wanliu by adjusting housing arrangements at the Yuanmingyuan campus." It gave no specifics.

At 10 a.m. on Monday, July 30, Pan Jianfeng, dean of the law school, emailed the 292 incoming Juris Master's students back: "We are aware of the situation described in the letter, and will pass the relevant demands on to the university... Fighting for students' legitimate interests is something we all agree on. But the university has its own difficulties... As for this outcome, as far as we know, the university has already made great efforts. We hope everyone can understand."

At 2 p.m. that day, several professional master's students from the 2016 cohort went to Peking University's Apartment Management Center and Graduate School to ask what was happening. They were told: "Right now this matter is fairly sensitive within the university. The school is coordinating housing with Yuanmingyuan, but clearing rooms and working out the details will take some time."

Zhou Yu, an incoming 2018 Master of Translation and Interpreting student in the School of Foreign Languages, and her classmates had heard nothing about housing, even though the school also appeared on the leaked table, which showed that only 34 of its 61 incoming students could be housed.

After they saw the law school's open letter, they contacted their own school out of worry, and at 10:30 a.m. on the 31st got a reply: the School of Foreign Languages had immediately set up a working group on bed allocation for 2018 Master of Translation and Interpreting students. "All 2018 Master of Translation and Interpreting students are eligible to take part in the bed allocation. Once Peking University's overall dormitory allocation plan is released, the working group will immediately draw up detailed rules and announce the housing arrangements."

On the afternoon of July 31, QDaily called Peking University's Apartment Service Center for details. The staff member on duty said, "I'm busy right now and don't know — please ask the admissions office." We then called the Graduate School, where the staff member on duty said: "For the official response, see the statement on Weiming BBS. I can't answer anything else."

Pan Mingbo was cautiously skeptical of those answers. "Yuanmingyuan only has a bit more than 600 beds in total. If they put these 500-plus new students there, wouldn't all the visiting scholars at Yuanmingyuan have to move?"

2. Not the First Time Space Has Been Tight

Cramped dorms and late notice have set off student anger at Peking University before. On August 25, 2015, some students said on Weiming BBS that they had been told that, "due to the university's centralized renovation of some older student dormitories, an increase in the number of doctoral students, and a shortage of existing two-person doctoral rooms," some doctoral students would have to live four to a room. At the time, 472 direct-PhD students from the 2014 cohort and 485 from the 2015 cohort were temporarily in four-person rooms, some of them in 13-square-meter rooms in Building 4 of Shaoyuan (known as "Shao Si"), converted from two-person rooms.

Peking University's shortage of land is not a new subject either, and the conflict between building a "quality campus," preserving historic buildings and protecting students' interests has never let up. In 2007, Building 27 near the south gate was torn down and rebuilt as the School of Education building. In 2011, the corridor-style buildings 16 to 18 near the south gate came down, replaced by a student activity center. In October 2014, buildings 28 to 31, 58 years old, were demolished as well, and three new six-story dormitories went up on the site.

According to a Construction Bulletin posted on the website of Peking University's Infrastructure Engineering Department, 15 construction projects were under way on campus as of the end of May. One of them involved renovating a student dormitory: Building 9 of Shaoyuan, which mainly houses international students.

But height limits on campus buildings mean all this tearing down and building up still hasn't kept pace with a student body that keeps growing. In the past three years alone, the total number of full-time students at Peking University rose by 2,941. A Zhihu user named Sun Muyang, who says he studied at Peking University for seven years, wrote that "around 2010, the dormitory management center warned its superiors that, at the current scale of enrollment and dormitory capacity, the university would face a large-scale dormitory shortage starting in 2013."

In March last year, Peking University president Lin Jianhua said the Yanyuan campus was running 40% over capacity in faculty and student numbers, buildings and dormitories.

This is also why the Yenching Academy, finished in 2014, once drew criticism. China News Service reported at the time that Building 6 of Shaoyuan, where Yenching Academy students lived, had been renovated so that each floor held 26 rooms — 14 single suites and 12 double suites, the doubles giving each person about 10 square meters. Across the road, the four-person rooms in Building 4 of Shaoyuan measured 13 square meters in total.

New campuses have become one of Peking University's main ways of easing the squeeze. The Wuxi campus opened in 2008; in 2016, the memorandum for a Peking University Shenzhen campus was signed at a ceremony in Guangzhou.

In its "Double First-Class" construction plan released this January, Peking University further proposed using Beijing Geely University in Changping District "as backup space to relieve the university's overcrowding."

3. Special Treatment for Professional Master's Students?

The professional master's exam is generally easier than the academic one: some professional programs have no advanced mathematics section, and the English paper for professional programs (English II) is easier than the academic one (English I). The programs are shorter, usually two years; the courses lean toward practice rather than academic theory; students can't go straight on to a PhD; and they get less scholarship money while paying higher tuition.

Pan Mingbo's law school is actually on the cheap end among the 16 Peking University departments that admit professional master's students — under the "Peking University 2017 Tuition Standards (Excluding the Health Science Center and the Shenzhen Graduate School)," total tuition for full-time professional master's programs across departments runs from 27,000 to 188,000 yuan.

One common view is that the professional master's has become a way for universities to make money. A comment from a user studying for a Master of Accounting captures it: "Right now, apart from a few schools with scholarships and stipends, most just keep tuition sky-high. Do they really think we'll earn that kind of money once we graduate with a professional accounting master's? Market-rate tuition has become an aboveboard way for some schools to rake in cash."

In the Peking University Graduate Admissions Brochure, the difference between the two shows up in housing as well: the university may arrange housing for academic-track master's students; it does not arrange housing for professional degree students.

With so little information to go on, public guesswork about the shortage has also fixed on the standing of professional master's students. Xi Ying and her co-authors made the point directly in that widely shared article, "To Stay at Peking University, I May Have to Spend 200,000 Yuan": "Professional master's students are still students. Why are they treated so coldly?"

Wu Chuan, an incoming 2018 Juris Master's student, told Jiefang Daily's Shanghai Observer: "My tuition and living expenses are all borrowed, and now I have to borrow for housing too. Why not take up the academic master's dorms? Whenever the allocation goes badly, why is it always us professional master's students who get hit?"

Xiong Bingqi, deputy director of the 21st Century Education Research Institute, wrote in a Beijing News commentary that turning this doubt into a question of rank — professional versus academic master's, graduate versus undergraduate — still follows the old thinking of "the university running society." Running campuses as boarding schools no longer fits the reform and development of higher education, and duties that should never have been the university's will sooner or later have to be handed off.

4. Market Reform of University Logistics

Wanliu Apartments does not house only Peking University's own students and staff.

From 2002 its residents changed from undergraduates to professional master's students and young faculty, with the remaining units offered on the open market. In 2007, Peking University set up the Special Housing Management Center and put it fully in charge of running Wanliu Apartments. Along with it came an enterprise-style management model for what had been a public institution. Min Weifang, then secretary of the Peking University Party Committee, said "Wanliu Apartments must ensure it serves faculty and students internally, while 'collecting rent to pay off debt' externally."

Wanliu Apartments is one of many university logistics operations trying this kind of transformation. The "Decision of the CPC Central Committee on the Reform of the Educational System", issued in 1985, said the direction for university logistics reform was to turn it over to the market. Two years ago the Ministry of Education issued "Several Opinions on Deepening the Market-Oriented Reform of University Logistics", calling for "a relatively complete new-style university logistics support system in most regions of China by 2020, in which services are provided by the market, schools make their own choices, the government exercises macro-level regulation, the industry practices self-discipline, and government departments carry out oversight in accordance with the law."

Zhao Guilian, then director of the Wanliu Apartments Special Housing Management Center at Peking University, and her deputy Zhou Bo wrote in an August 2013 paper, "Practical Exploration of Diversified Services and Operational Transformation and Upgrading for Off-Campus Apartments," that in 2012, 68% of Wanliu's housing-fee revenue came from outside the university and 32% from inside it: "On-campus faculty and students take up more resources while paying less, while off-campus residents take up fewer resources yet contribute more revenue."

After the management model changed, six years of growth meant Wanliu Apartments no longer needed money from the university and began handing over its surplus instead. "Over more than four years (2007 to 2012), Wanliu Apartments, while keeping itself running, turned over more than 100 million yuan to the university."

What Zhao Guilian and Zhou Bo counted as a success story of market reform in university logistics is, to some of the incoming professional master's students, exactly what deserves criticism. Public records show that some units at Wanliu are still rented out to international students from Beijing Institute of Technology and students in Renmin University of China's 3+2 program. One student told Jiefang Daily's Shanghai Observer: "If the university can't even solve its own students' housing problem, shouldn't it take back the dorms it rents out to outsiders?"

For Peking University's incoming 2018 professional master's students — told a month before enrollment, and under real financial strain because they are studying full-time — the university's answers so far have not settled their minds. "Right now we just hope the university will put out an official statement soon with a solution. A lot of students are anxious about it. They don't know whether to start looking for a rental now, in case it's too late later," Pan Mingbo told QDaily.

On July 30, the 292 incoming 2018 Juris Master's students sent the university another long letter in response to the Wanliu reply on the BBS, restating three demands: that their right to information be protected, with the university disclosing why the shortage appeared so suddenly and what Wanliu's actual occupancy rate is; that housing be arranged as in past years; and that they would not accept a plan that solved the problem only in part or only within their own program.

As of publication, the university had not updated its response.

(Pan Mingbo and Zhou Yu are pseudonyms, at the interviewees' request.)

Cover image from the apartments' website and Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash