"It had infringed the civil rights of undergraduates, who should have enjoyed the same freedom to marry as other Chinese citizens after reaching the legal age," says Lao, who is also a professor at Capital Normal University in Beijing.

"It's good to see that the Education Ministry abolished the restriction 10 years ago to make student management regulations at universities comply with the law," he says.

Although the ban was lifted, undergraduates' willingness to marry has not changed much in the past 10 years.

A survey conducted in 2012 on Renren.com, a social networking website popular among college students, showed that only 17 percent of such students were willing to marry while at university.

Lao says he received wedding invitations from some of his graduate students in the past 10 years, but none from his undergraduate students. "Only a minority of undergraduates are getting married at university in China," he says.

Zhou Xiaopeng, director of the Marriage Research Institute under Baihe.com, a dating website, says most undergraduates get married on the spur of the moment.

"As young people, they are keen to make promises, and a key way of doing that is to get married."

Fan says her marriage was, to some extent, the product of a sudden impulse.

"When I had to leave Sao Paulo in 2013, I couldn't bear to be separated from my boyfriend. I wanted to stay with him forever, so I married him," she says.