The College of Continuing Education of NEFU began in the 1960s, and began adult degree education in 1963. It is one of the first five colleges that started correspondence and night courses approved and filed with Ministry of Education in Heilongjiang province. With the rapid development of both national adult higher education and NEFU, along with the increasing demands of job markets, we have endeavored to continuously expand our college, enhance fundamental teaching and deepen education and teaching reform in a holistic way. Through all these efforts, we have accomplished considerable progress. In 1991, the College of Adult Education of NEFU was founded and renamed the NEFU College of Continuing Education in 2013, marking a new stage of rapid development of NEFU’s continuing education.

For years, NEFU’s continuing education has followed the rules of continuing education, sticking to the orientation of regarding forestry as the characteristic, taking the northeast area as a basis, and catering to the society and serving forestry as well as the regional economy. Under the guidance of the reform of educational ideas and concepts, we have deepened education and teaching reform and fully implemented quality-oriented education and innovative education, aiming to meet social demands, improving the quality of talent, and taking the basic construction of education as priority.

During the process of building a lifelong learning society, NEFU’s continuing education has achieved a certain scale: forming a pattern featuring forestry, combing a variety of disciplines such as science, engineering, economics, management and law and taking adult degree and non-degree education as its focus. Currently, NEFU offers correspondence courses and night courses for 57 bachelor’s degree and associate degree programs, respectively. At present, there are more than 10,000 students pursuing their degrees and 16 correspondence centers, recruiting students for Accounting, Civil Engineering, Landscape Architecture, Forestry, Road and Bridge Engineering, Building Environment and Equipment Engineering, Traffic and Transportation, Electrical Engineering and Automation, Art and Design, Law, Business Administration, Mechanical and Electronic Integration, Computer Science and Technology etc. from Heilongjiang Province, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, Shandong Province, Shanxi Province, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region and Yunnan Province, etc. We have cultivated over 40,000 graduates for degree education and held a series of in-service training sessions for large and medium-sized enterprises, departments, and factories, along with training courses for professional certificates and all types of short-term training classes in order to make a positive contribution to the development of national forestry and local economy, especially the transformation of northeast China’s rust-belt industrial bases.

By earnestly implementing the Party’s educational policy in our long-term education practice, NEFU was awarded as an Excellent University in National Adult Education Evaluation by the State Education Commission in 1997; evaluated as an Advanced Unit of National Forestry Adult Education by the State Forestry Administration in 1999; commended as one of the 5 Excellent Universities by the Education Department of Heilongjiang in the Inspection of Heilongjiang Adult Education and Teaching in 2002. NEFU’s correspondence center in Qiqihar Forestry School was rated as one of the 15 excellent correspondence centers in the province in the assessment of correspondence centers by the Education Department of Heilongjiang in 2004. NEFU was awarded as an Advanced Unit of Provincial Adult Education by the Education Department of Heilongjiang in 2006.