To understand current university students’ achievement motivation and self-esteem and research the relationship between them, we investigated on 430 university students by using EMS and SES. The results are as follows: 1) In some extent, the college students’ self-esteem can forecast their achievement motivation. 2) The female college students’ failure-avoiding motivation is significantly higher than the male ones and the excellent female college students’ self-esteem is significantly higher than the excellent male ones’. 3) The excellent college students’ self-esteem is significantly higher and failure-avoiding motivation is significantly lower than the ordinary ones’.