Faced with the fierce competition in the metropolitan, the whole society is largely concerned about college students’ attitudes and value orientation towards life and death, and life education occupies a great important part of plans of maturing undergraduates in all universities. In such a context, research on college students’ life cognition and value orientation is of great realistic and theoretical significance. Life cognition is an overall understanding towards the process of life and death, and a psychological quality evolving with age. In the basis of life cognition, value orientation towards life is an individual’s fundamental views and attitudes about the value of life, the meaning of life, ideals and goals in life and a series of closely related with the existence of life issues. In the social context of life education , from three perspectives of cognition, emotion and intention, 812 undergraduates of grade one and three from four schools in Shanghai, recruited and participating in the projecting principle, including syntax tests and simulated situations, were measured their current levels of knowledge and feelings and features of value orientation towards life, in order to explore the developmental extent of undergraduate’s knowledge and feelings on life and death, and to conclude the traits of their value orientation towards life in contemporary. The results showed that（1）College students’ knowledge about life was characterized by the attitude-expressing cognition. And the expressions had the positive and cherishing features towards life. However, the development of the knowledge about death was stayed in the abstract cognition, and college students were intended to use neutral, conceptual and simple words to describe the meaning of death. Furthermore, female showed more deeply and variedly to life and death than male.（2）In the traits of value orientation towards life, undergraduates emphasized on interpersonal relationship. Their actor would be inclined to love, and to be responsible to their family.