I have worked at Henan University of Science & Technology for several years. It began inauspiciously and has grown progressively worse over time.

The school is a degree mill more interested in making a quick profit than in educating anyone. Class sizes have gone up 25% or more in my time (from an already too large 30 students per class to 40 or more today for Oral English lessons). Teaching hours have stagnated or dropped as the student body has consistently grown. The contract has decreased the minimum number of teaching hours from 16 to 14 during my tenure and the hourly teaching pay has not increased at all. Teachers here are constantly lured with the promise of the upper limit hours (20 per week) but my schedule has always either fallen far short of that or only reached that level for a few short weeks of a term with the average number of hours being much less.

The housing provided by the school is small and old in an old, poor and dirty section of the city. Repairs and basic maintenance are constantly necessary and are a constant hassle as the school's caretaker is slow and lazy on the best of days, but absent and incommunicado as a regular matter of course. The school's Foreign Affairs Office will be of generally little or no help in resolving these problems, especially if they occur on a weekend or during one of the long holidays - Spring Festival and the summer break. Also, travel from the school housing to the school campus takes 45-90 minutes by bus or 30-60 minutes by taxi each way.

Finally, be very wary of any and all agreements made with this school. The people in the Foreign Affairs Office (Ms Yu and Monica) will expect that you adhere strictly to even the most mundane points of the contract while they will expect you to accept a flexibility from them that may technically constitute "Breach of Contract" (I'm not a lawyer). As an example, payments and reimbursements are considered by the school to be at the discretion of the school in both amounts and timeline. They will contravene an established system without notification (changing from paying at the beginning of a month to paying at the end of a month, in my case) or insist on rules that are not a part of the written contract (arbitrarily limiting home travel reimbursement, in my case) or simply ignore parts if the contact that are inconvenient for them (meeting foreign teachers at the train station or airport, for example). Remember! They will find a reason to not pay anything they can!

A word about the weather/climate of Luoyang: Although the winters are generally quite mild here and most public buildings are heated for the coldest parts of winter and air conditioned for the hottest parts of summer, the pollution here is TERRIBLE! It may not be as well know as some of the bigger cities in China (Beijing, for example) but, so far in 2017 (it's April as I am writing this) air quality has been listed as "Dangerous" or "Very dangerous" nearly every day. The website travelchinaguide.com ranked Luoyang #40 out of 41 Chinese cities in terms of air quality (Beijing was #20 and Shanghai was #22).

I have taught in China for many years and have had many good experiences in China, but this has not been one of them! Avoid this school!