Recently, with Zhejiang’s Taizhou Radio and TV University (RTVU) affiliation with Jindatian Village, a college was opened at the doors of villagers, giving all villagers a chance to study in the same classroom. The first village-level rural college student class in Zhejiang Province was launched in the village, which became a new pattern for the “project of training rural college students” in the Zhejiang RTVU system.

In the class, the township enterprise management programme has been opened, covering two and a half academic years. It is oriented towards rural students with a senior middle school graduate degree with a certain knowledge foundation. The tuition of RMB 3,000 due to the university will be subsidized by the government. In this way, each student will only have to pay RMB 2,000 as a study fee. The teaching content has been tailored to the requirements of the students and will be divided into compulsory and optional modules. The students can obtain a college diploma after acquiring 76 credits. 

Kang Zhengmei, 47 years old, is Party Secretary of Jindatian Village, and also the monitor of the class. In his early years, due to his poor financial situation, he had to hastily end his schooling after graduating from senior high school. But now he has a farm on more than 100 Mu. In order to better operate and manage his operation, he was contemplating going to a college to “recharge himself”, and become a new farmer. So he brought his wife, who also only had a senior high school education, as well as their son, to study in this “college at their door”. Like Kang Zhengmei’s family, many other farmers in Jindatian Village also choose to “recharge themselves” in the college. Currently, a total of 43 farmers have passed the enrollment evaluation and have become “new students” of the RTVU.  

President of Zhejiang RTVU Ye Hong thought that, although there are only a little over 40 students in this class, the creative model of joint cultivation of rural college students can truly extend RTVU's school management influence to towns and villages. It has expanded the stage on which to serve the construction of a new socialist countryside by RTVU, which carries far-reaching significance in training high quality professionals for agriculture, farmers, and rural areas, enhancing modern agricultural levels and forging a humanistic country. He emphasized that it was essential to keep the main focus on enabling students to have tangible gains and enabling villages to have tangible earnings. 

In 2007, provincial RTVU system in Zhejiang launched the “project of training rural college students”, which opened special classes to recruit rural college students and determined the setting of majors, and employed experts and teachers according to the needs of rural students. It paid special attention to the implementation of classroom teaching, offering a practical base that was welcomed by the majority of rural college students. 

By Zhejiang RTVU