When Vocational Education Meets Industry: Lessons from China’s Higher Vocational Education Program Adjustments on Time Trends and Structural Differences

• In Event: Educational Improvement, Governance and Integration: Leadership, Inclusion, and Education–Industry Alignment in Comparative Perspective

Proposal

In recent years, global shortages and mismatches of skilled labor have emerged as key challenges for both worker welfare and labor market efficiency. A central cause lies in education and training systems that fail to adapt quickly to changing market demands, resulting in weak alignment with industrial needs. As a core pathway for cultivating skilled workers, higher vocational education (HVE) reforms have been widely adopted worldwide as a supply-side and institutional tool to bridge the education–employment gap and promote effective skill formation.

In China, dynamic program adjustments have been used to steer HVE structural optimization, serving as a central strategy to facilitate the meeting of education and industry. Assessing this reform is expected to provide critical evidence on China’s vocational education, and could offer valuable insights for comparative research and practice on skill formation, particularly in transition economies. From a global perspective, China’s system contrasts with the collective models of Germany and Switzerland and the liberal models of the US and UK, while following a trajectory similar to the rapidly evolving East Asian system (Busemeyer & Trampusch, 2012). From a historical perspective, China’s skill formation system has evolved through a ‘crossing the river by feeling the stones’ approach. Since the market-oriented transition, employer investment in vocational training has declined significantly, and the country is now at a critical stage of restructuring education–industry relations and deepening integration (Yang, 2020; Ha et al., 2023). From a domestic perspective, HVE program adjustments operate as a national-level policy intervention, with effects that unfold over time and vary depending on the local context across cities, institutions, and industries.

However, existing international and domestic literature has yet to provide a systematic evaluation of this reform. A major constraint is the absence of reliable indicators that capture education–industry alignment from the perspective of educational inputs, rely on administrative data, and allow objective measurement of skill match or mismatch. In response to this limitation, this study adopts the analytical lens of the regional skills ecosystem and introduces a new method to measure the structural coupling between HVE and industry systems.

Theoretically, the regional skills ecosystem framework emphasizes that skill supply, skill demand, and institutional context operate not in isolation but as an interdependent system of dynamic interactions. Within this system, the linkage between productive workers and employment opportunities constitutes the critical nexus between the skill formation subsystem (centered on individual skills) and the skill utilization subsystem (centered on firm profits). In terms of measurement, this linkage can be conceptualized as a coupling between educational program structures and industrial employment structures. Based on the quantification of coupling via cosine similarity between vectors, this study proposes an evaluation measure termed the Education–Industry Structural Coupling (EISC) index.

Empirically, this study draws on two main data sources: administrative records of institution-level HVE programs from China’s Ministry of Education (2012–2024), capturing the supply-side training structures, and industry-level employment data from the China City Statistical Yearbook (2012–2019), reflecting demand-side labor structures. Using a 13-dimensional mapping between HVE program categories and industrial sectors, it first assesses the overall effectiveness of dynamic program adjustments, then examines heterogeneity across cities, institutions, and sectors. The main findings are as follows:

First, overall trends. Between 2012 and 2019, the average EISC across cities rose modestly from 0.665 to 0.685. While high-EISC cities expanded rapidly, other cities showed no consistent pattern.

Second, city-level heterogeneity. By economic development level, high-GDP cities experienced steady EISC growth, whereas low-GDP cities grew slightly and unevenly, widening the gap. This confirms the mutually reinforcing relationship between regional economic development and education–industry collaboration. By pilot status, EISC rose significantly in pilot cities but remained largely stagnant in non-pilot cities, reflecting the positive interplay between top-down design and bottom-up experimentation, as well as between national coordination and regional innovation.

Third, institution-level heterogeneity. By institutional quality, key institutions benefiting from targeted construction projects maintained stable EISC performance, while non-key institutions improved but lagged, underscoring the role of fiscal allocation patterns and resource intensity. By institutional type, public institutions showed fluctuating upward trends, whereas private institutions achieved steadier gains but remained lower and more variable. This suggests that private institutions face strong pressures of competition and imitation vis-à-vis public institutions, yet often act in a fragmented and uncoordinated manner.

Fourth, industry-level heterogeneity. By production characteristics, secondary and tertiary sectors maintained stable EISC, with the former consistently ahead. This pattern is likely explained by vocational education’s ties to manufacturing, standardized industrial labor, and weak fit with gig-economy roles. By skill demand intensity, industries with high demand for skilled labor (e.g., electronics, business and finance, and mining & exploration) achieved faster and more sustained EISC growth, whereas the counterpart industries stagnated at lower levels. Technological frontier sectors generate strong labor demand, driving rapid vocational training adjustments; absent such demand, systemic alignment incentives remain limited.

In summary, drawing on a skills supply–demand framework, the newly developed Education–Industry Structural Coupling (EISC) measure, and panel data on China’s city-level HVE and industry systems, this study finds that between 2012 and 2019, dynamic program adjustments modestly improved education–industry alignment, though significant heterogeneity remains across cities, institutions, and sectors. These findings not only demonstrate the historical and contemporary performance of the statist skill formation system exemplified by China (Green et al., 1999; Yang, 2020; Ha et al., 2023), but also underscore that effective skill development is jointly shaped by economic conditions, institutional capacity, and industrial context.

Taken together, policymakers and practitioners should strengthen institutional, resource, and informational support for economically lagging cities, non-key institutions, and rapidly evolving sectors, while scaling and localizing successful pilot programs, thereby enabling vocational education to better meet industry needs and equipping youth with work-ready skills. These strategies hold particular relevance for developing and skill-intensive economies. Moreover, the proposed EISC measure is highly transferable, offering potential for application in other countries and supporting further empirical research on education–industry interactions.

Authors

• Sihui Du, Graduate School of Education, Peking University

• Wei Ha