The college has established a high-quality education training system for graduate students. Uniform schedule and procedure are adopted for all students, including their admission, thesis proposal defense, qualify exam (for PhD student), pre-defense and thesis defense.

A supervisory committee is generally established for graduate student education, which typically consists of the student’s academic adviser as the committee chair and additional 3-5 faculty members in related research directions from either within or outside of the college. Regular group meetings are held by the committee to learn and discuss the progress of the student’s academic training, including curriculum study, scientific research and dissertation. For different disciplines, program schedules are tailored to meet each individual student’ needs in his/her academic education.

Master students are required to complete a total of 33 credits during their 3 years’ academic program, including 3 public compulsory course, 3 college compulsory course, 1 Essay Writing course, 3or4 major compulsory course, and the others are selective course. Courses are graded on a grading system, and all courses must be graded at least D. In addition to the course requirement, students are also required to conduct a specific research project, and publish at least one peer-reviewed paper related to his/her research as the first author or second author (in this case her/his adviser as the first author) in scientific journals. Their thesis must be independently carried out under the direction of his/her supervisor, and must meet the academic standards of Peking University.

The Ph.D. program typically requires three to five years to complete. It can be extended to a maximum of 8 years. It is aimed to help the students develop the professional research ethnics, academic exploration motivation, and independent capability in scientific research and innovation.

The Ph.D. program is classified into three categories:

a) Four-year program. It is tailored to the students with Master degree in related field. It requires a total of 22 course credits, including 2 public compulsory course, 3 college compulsory course, 1 Essay Writing course, 1 major compulsory course, and the others are selective course.

b) Five-year program. It is designed for the students who have just gained their Bachelor degree in related field.

c) Three-year program. It is tailored to the mater students at Peking University, who wish to pursue a PhD degree in the same field.

The second and third categories have the same credits requirement, but with a different admission procedure. Both of them are required to complete a total of 42 credits, including 2 public compulsory course, 3 college compulsory course, 1 Essay Writing course, 3or4 major compulsory course, and the others are selective course. The college also places a particular emphasis on developing unique course. Since 2010, the college started a course named as Environmental Science and Engineering Frontier. It adopts a style of module teaching, open, interactive manner through lectures given by 10 or more well-known scientists invited from different institutions across China or aboard.

All Ph.D. students training process consists of four stages, qualify exam, dissertation proposal defense, pre-dissertation defense, and final dissertation defense. All candidates are required to publish SCI/SSCI papers (first author, or second author with his/her supervisor as the first author) with an impact factor of more than 4. The dissertation is conducted under the directions of his/her supervisor and the dissertation committee. The committee is generally composed of at least 5 faculty members. The dissertation is expected to be a systematic investigation of a particular environmental problem and to contribute to the research field in science or technical innovation.