Multi-party Collaborative Education: A New Way to Train High-Quality Engineering Talents in China

Proficient engineering problem-solving skills are indispensable for engineers, but the limited engineering practice experience provided by universities cannot meet the future work requirements and career development needs of engineering graduates. To give full play to the role of university external resources in training engineering talents, China has proposed and implemented a multi-party collaborative education(MPCE) model in which universities, enterprises, scientific research institutions, industry organizations, and governments have cooperated in-depth. Different from previous engineering education reform policies, MPCE is the first important engineering education reform made by China from the level of national development planning since entering the 21st century. This model aims to carry out the cooperation with various stakeholders outside the university in a larger scope and deeper degree, to train all kinds of engineering talents to better match industry requirements and adapt to the current and future development of economic society. To provide some inputs and rationales to engineering education policymakers in other national contexts, this paper systematically sets out China's MPCE model, and analyzes the MPCE conceptual framework and the roles of universities, enterprises, research institutes, governments, and industry organizations in MPCE. It is concluded that the systematicness, synergy, and integrity of policies are crucial to the formation and development of the university-industry interaction.