Northeast Normal University is an institution of higher learning under the direct administration of the Ministry of Education, being selected as one of the universities given priority in construction in the 211 Project. Six disciplines of NENU, Marxism, world history, mathematics, chemistry, statistics, materials science and engineering, have been selected into the "Double First-rate" construction disciplines in 2017.
Over the past 70 years since the establishment of the university, NENU has formed a distinctive school-running characteristic of "Serving Basic Education", being praised as "The Cradle of the People's Teachers".
In recent years, the four disciplines, including Chemistry, Materials Science, Engineering, and Plant and Animal Science, have been listed in the top 1% of the ESI global ranking, and NENU has ranked fourth of the ESI total cited articles among national colleges and universities. There is one national engineering laboratory and six ministerial-level key laboratories for drug gene and protein screening. And there are two key research bases for Humanities and Social Sciences of the Ministry of Education, i.e. The Research Center of World Civilization History and The Institute of Rural Education.