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The 33-year-old won a place at the university’s College of Literature and Law and will join its Class of 2026 in a three-year program. The university says she is the first frontline sanitation worker in its roughly 70-year history to earn a graduate place while still on the job.

Before taking the cleaning job, Li and her husband had run a maocai eatery near the campus, serving the Sichuan hotpot-style dish, until it closed, Red Star News reported. She joined the university’s logistics team in 2021 for the work’s stability, fixed hours and closeness to home, which made it easier to care for her two children, now in primary school.

Her cleaning route runs through the university’s East District, which hosts national examinations from the postgraduate test to the civil service exam. Cleaning around the test halls each exam season, she watched candidates who had come from as far as Xinjiang and Heilongjiang memorize notes under the streetlights and saw grey-haired adults sitting exams of their own, Red Star News reported. She had also added many students on the messaging app WeChat, and each year, as results came out, her feed filled with their celebrations, until she began to wonder whether she might one day post one of her own.

In April 2025 she made up her mind. Holding only a vocational college diploma rather than a bachelor’s degree, she had to sit six exam papers where most candidates sit four, the two extra being undergraduate subjects required of applicants without a degree.

She could not afford a tutoring course, so she studied alone. English came easily, she told West China Metropolis Dailyas it had been her college major, and politics was manageable. It was the law subjects, entirely new to her, that took up about 80% of her study time.

She found the hours in the cracks of her day. Up at 5:45 a.m. and on the job by 6, she listened to politics and English audio through a single earphone as she swept, keeping the other ear free for colleagues, then gave up her lunchtime nap to drill practice questions over a coffee and studied late into the night once her children were asleep, Red Star News reported.

In July 2025 she was appointed to a first-class sanitation post that brought team-management duties and a heavier workload, and the strain nearly made her quit, until a close friend urged her to try rather than risk the regret.

When the admission came through on April 7, Li had just collected her children from school, and the first call she made was to her mother in the countryside, whom she had never told she was taking the exam.

“Within the workday, I earn my living; outside it, I work to better myself,” she told West China Metropolis Dailyadding that she had never aimed to be among the top performers, only to work a little harder and more carefully than those around her.

Her story has since spread across Chinese social media, where many have praised her as an example to her own children. She hopes to stay on at the university after she graduates.