The Sound of the Two Sessions|Facing the Challenges of Vocational Education Integration: “Schools are Enthusiastic but Enterprises are Cold, and the Integration is Not Deep Enough”? Political Consultants Make Suggestions
Currently, Shanghai is actively promoting the “two pioneering and testing” initiatives in higher education, comprehensively deepening the reform of higher education. As the main battlefield for talent training, local application-oriented universities should strive to output more high-quality application-oriented talents and high-quality application research results based on industry demands. At the Shanghai Two Sessions in 2025, Gong Siyi, a member of the Shanghai Political Consultative Conference and the president of Shanghai Dianji University, brought a proposal suggesting to accelerate the high-quality development of local application-oriented universities in Shanghai.
Gong Siyi stated that currently, due to multiple factors, local application-oriented universities have performed poorly in terms of quality and speed of development, and their support and contribution to the industry need to be urgently improved.
“Firstly, the connection between discipline settings and industrial demands is not close enough; secondly, the transformation and upgrading of traditional majors is slow, and the construction of new engineering disciplines is lagging behind; thirdly, teaching content is outdated, and there is a lack of linkage mechanism for new technologies and new crafts in enterprises.” Gong Siyi further analyzed that the motivation for enterprises to participate in integration of industry and education is also insufficient. Enterprises mainly proceed from economic interests, have a weak awareness of actively participating in talent training, are reluctant to invest too much in links such as developing training programs and curriculum development, and do not trust the technological research and development capabilities of application-oriented universities. The integration of industry and education has shown problems such as “enthusiasm from schools but not from enterprises”, “shallow integration”, and the working mechanism has not yet been truly established.
At the same time, Gong Siyi also pointed out that compared with research universities, financial investment for local application-oriented universities is clearly insufficient, which leads to problems of funding shortages in infrastructure, laboratory equipment, and faculty construction. The targeted policy support aimed at the characteristics and needs of local application-oriented universities is not yet perfect, and the division of responsibilities and powers, financial support, legal guarantees for all parties involved in the integration of industry and education have not yet been clearly defined.
In response to this, she made suggestions: On one hand, it is necessary to coordinate and consolidate the supply of disciplines and majors in colleges and universities based on social needs, connect with national strategic and regional industrial development needs, accelerate the optimization and adjustment of disciplines and majors, concentrate on building several majors with good foundation, excellent characteristics, and strong applications, accelerate the layout of urgently needed majors, and timely reduce majors that do not meet social demands. On the other hand, she also proposed to establish a joint guidance committee for the integration of industry, education, and cities to coordinate government and enterprise resources, set up special funds to support the construction of training bases and collaborative research and development between schools and enterprises. At the same time, it supports and encourages enterprises to deeply participate in talent training in colleges and universities by providing internship opportunities, sharing production sites and equipment materials, participating in curriculum setting and textbook compilation, and promote collaborative innovation and resource sharing.
“We hope that the municipal level can reasonably adjust the structure of educational expenditure to appropriately favor local application-oriented universities by increasing their investment in campus infrastructure, purchase of laboratory equipment, team construction, etc. At the same time, we hope to formulate special preferential policies for talent training, team building, scientific and technological innovation in local application-oriented universities. Those enterprises with high participation in school-enterprise cooperation will be prioritized as key units for supporting non-Shanghai graduates’ settlement.” Said Gong Siyi.