Before you pay tuition, check whether the school is on the certified-institution list at the Chinese Service Center for Scholarly Exchange

If you need this diploma back in China for further study, a job, or an exam, you can apply to the Chinese Service Center for Scholarly Exchange for certification. It publishes a list of schools that passed certification in the past 5 years. Being on the list does not guarantee you will pass. Being off the list does not mean they will refuse to take the application. Check once before you pay tuition. If the school is not on the list, ask a further question.

Cost

No cost. Type the school name once into the "certified-institution lookup" at the Chinese Service Center for Scholarly Exchange (留学服务中心 — the Ministry of Education office that certifies overseas degrees). It takes a few minutes.

Benefit

Article 1 of the Measures for Certifying Academic Degrees and Diplomas from Outside China, issued by the Chinese (Ministry of Education) Service Center for Scholarly Exchange, states that certification is to "meet the applicant's needs for further study, employment, exams, and similar purposes." Article 2 states that certification is done "on the applicant's own application." The center has a certified-institution lookup. You search by school name. Its instructions say the list is the foreign awarding institutions that appeared in applications certified in the past 5 years, and that it is "for the reference of people who studied abroad only, and is not a guarantee or basis for any successful certification." The instructions also say the scope of applications they will accept "is not limited to the institutions this lookup shows," that each application is assessed on its own, and that whether the school is lawful and qualified to issue the credential is only part of the assessment. The list is updated once a year. The 2025 update removed 270 schools that had not had a certificate issued in the past 5 years. Separately, the Ministry of Education information site on supervision of cross-border education (教育涉外监管信息网) also publishes supervision information on Chinese-foreign cooperative programs and on schools run overseas.

Notes

An agent saying "recognized by the Ministry of Education" does not count. Go by what you find online yourself. The list changes. A school that is on it when you enroll may not still be on it when you graduate, so check again once a year while you are studying. Chinese-foreign cooperative programs have a separate certification and registration system. If you enrolled after 2008, you can look up your registration number on that supervision site with your name and national ID number.

Sources · 3

1. 中国（教育部）留学服务中心. 认证院校查询（含使用须知）. yxcx.cscse.edu.cn/
2. 中国（教育部）留学服务中心 (2023). 国（境）外学历学位认证办法（第一、二条）. zwfw.cscse.edu.cn/zwfw/lxfwzxwsfwdt2020/xlxwr…
3. 教育部教育涉外监管信息网. jsj.moe.gov.cn/