Coupling Pathways for Building "Golden Majors" in Emerging Engineering at Higher Vocational Colleges under New Quality Productive Forces: A Regional Industry–Education Integration Community Framework

Abstract

Against the background of China’s transition from factor- and investment-driven growth to innovation-led high-quality development, new quality productive forces are reshaping industrial technologies, production organization, occupational structures, and regional skill demand. Higher vocational colleges are therefore required not merely to add several digital courses to existing engineering programs, but to reconstruct the logic of major development, curriculum organization, teaching resources, faculty capability, and technical services. This paper focuses on the construction of “golden majors” in emerging engineering and examines how regional industry–education integration communities can function as the meso-level institutional carrier that couples industrial transformation with professional education reform. Using policy-text analysis, literature synthesis, and system-coupling reasoning, the study integrates the perspectives of the Triple Helix, regional innovation systems, dynamic capabilities, absorptive capacity, and situated learning. It defines a vocational emerging-engineering golden major as a high-level major that demonstrates strategic alignment with regional industrial upgrading, advanced and transferable technical competence, deep integration of real production and learning, strong faculty and platform support, measurable innovation services, and sustainable multi-actor governance. On this basis, the paper constructs a six-dimensional coupling mechanism involving demand, knowledge, organization, resources, innovation, and quality feedback. It further identifies prominent constraints, including delayed major adjustment, fragmented curricula, shallow enterprise participation, weak conversion of enterprise technology into teaching resources, insufficient industry experience among teachers, platform idling, and evaluation systems that emphasize inputs rather than contributions. To address these problems, a coordinated pathway is proposed: establish a regional skills observatory; implement dynamic major governance; reconstruct competency standards and modular curricula around work processes; develop project-based teaching from authentic production tasks; create entity-based community governance and benefit-sharing rules; build mixed school–enterprise teaching teams; operate shared training and innovation platforms; embed technical services into talent cultivation; and establish evidence-based quality assurance. Finally, the paper presents a four-stage implementation roadmap and a multi-dimensional evaluation framework. The study argues that the decisive criterion of a golden major is not resource accumulation itself, but its sustained capacity to translate regional industrial change into high-quality technical-skill formation and to convert educational advantages into industrial innovation and inclusive regional development.