Founded in 2014, the SWJTU-Leeds Joint School in Chengdu, Sichuan province, represents a long-running collaboration between Southwest Jiaotong University and the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom. Approved by the Ministry of Education, it is a Sino-foreign cooperative education institution without independent legal person status. Currently, the school offers seven undergraduate programs, including Civil Engineering with Transport, Mechanical Engineering, Electronic and Electrical Engineering, as well as Computer Science. It has a total enrollment of 1,514 students.
Adhering to socialism with Chinese characteristics, the school is committed to cultivating talent for the Party and the country. It combines the principle of "taking China as the mainstay" with the strategy of "introducing, absorbing and innovating". Leveraging the strong disciplines of SWJTU and the high-quality educational resources and management experience of the University of Leeds, the school not only imparts knowledge and cultivates abilities but also fosters students' values.
READ MORE: New Sino-British study program begins
It promotes holistic education encompassing moral, intellectual, physical, aesthetic and labor education, striving to nurture versatile talent with a strong sense of national identity, a global perspective, innovative capability and a spirit of practicality, as well as outstanding engineers who will lead future technological development and drive social progress in the new era.
Over the past decade, the school has educated six cohorts of graduates totaling 2,058 students, achieving high dual-degree attainment rates, high further study rates and strong development potential. The dual-degree attainment rate exceeds 90 percent, while more than 60 percent of graduates have been awarded first-class honors degrees by the University of Leeds. The further study rate has exceeded 80 percent, with more than 70 percent of students admitted to top 50 QS-ranked universities such as the University of Cambridge, Imperial College London, Tsinghua University and Peking University. Graduates who choose to enter the workforce have secured positions at Fortune Global 500 companies including China Railway, State Grid Corporation of China, BYD, Microsoft and Alibaba.
The school was elected chair unit of the Chinese-foreign Joint Education Committee in 2018 and again in 2022. It was selected as an excellent case of Sino-foreign cooperative education in 2024 and honored with the title of outstanding Sino-foreign cooperative education institution in 2025, emerging as a benchmark for engineering-focused Sino-foreign cooperative education in China.
ALSO READ: Cross-cultural cooperation drives creative education in media industry
Regarding these achievements, Hai-Sui Yu, provost and deputy vice-chancellor from the University of Leeds, said: "While we have strategic partnerships with a number of universities worldwide, the collaboration with SWJTU is by far the most substantial and the most important."
This year, the school is set to embark on a new chapter of development at the international campus of SWJTU. This move is a key initiative to advance the university's internationalization strategy and build a high-level education framework, as well as a critical opportunity for the school to enhance quality and efficiency and achieve high-quality development.
Looking ahead, the SWJTU-Leeds Joint School said it will continue to uphold its educational philosophy of "Engineering your future and Engineering a better world", steadily promote high-level educational opening-up and work closely with the University of Leeds to contribute to the cultivation of outstanding engineers for both China and the UK.
