Institutionalized higher education research originated in the United States in the 1960s, with Martin Trow and Burton Clark making unique contributions as pioneers. Since the 1980s, the rise of neoliberalism, the development of globalization, and the expansion of technology have become prominent features of the higher education system. Higher education research needs to conduct in-depth analysis of these developments and their effects. In the new era, the higher education system itself faces new challenges, which mainly include the outcome and fair opportunities of graduates, employment of college students, the social value of higher education, and how to promote more diverse voices and topics. With the rise of the East Asian higher education system, the world’s higher education landscape is undergoing major changes. Countries around the world need to enhance mutual understanding. It is essential to understand their own higher education system and the world’s higher education system through thinking about others.

Achieving integrated innovation among government, industry, academia, and research is a crucial issue that needs to be addressed in the development of new forms of productivity. Based on the TOE framework, this study analyzes the driving paths of collaborative innovation among these sectors using a sample of 114 publicly listed companies in emerging digital intelligence fields, employing fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis. The results indicate that high-quality productivity levels are generated through four main paths: “multi-dimensional and comprehensive driving, government-industry-academia collaboration, enterprise-led, and environment-supported”.Government innovation support policies are identified as significant driving factors for companies to overcome their own limitations and external resource constraints. Collaboration between industry and academia, along with an increased proportion of academic executives, enhances the opportunities for typified cooperation among different entities and paths. In the future, it is essential to harness the collaborative innovation capabilities of all parties, strengthen the government’s guiding and coordinating role in the innovation system, establish a supply-demand mechanism for industry-academia-research cooperation that aligns with the developmental needs of enterprises, and explore the creation of a distinctive government-industry-academia research cooperation system that fits regional development characteristics and leverages enterprise advantages.

Based on panel data from 30 provinces in China from 2012 to 2021, a new quality productive forces evaluation index system is constructed using technology productivity, digital productivity, and green productivity as primary indicators to explore the impact mechanism of higher education resource allocation on the development of new quality productive forces. The results indicate that the allocation of higher education resources can promote the development of new quality productive forces and play a mediating role through industrial transformation and upgrading. The impact of higher education resource allocation on the development of new quality productive forces exhibits a “S” - shaped growth cycle with dual threshold effects and spatial spillover effects that benefit neighboring regions. There is heterogeneity in the impact of different geographical regions and resource types as observation points. Based on this, the main direction should be to promote the improvement of technological productivity, and higher education resources should be regarded as key value investments to promote the development of new quality productive forces. Guide the deep integration of the education chain and the industry chain, and respond quickly when traditional growth drivers still have potential and the scale effect of higher education has not reached a turning point. Establish a spatial correlation awareness for the development of new quality productive forces, and optimize the allocation of higher education resources through regional coordinated development.

Geopolitical crises brought uncertainties and challenges to international research collaboration. Given this background, it is the top priority of China’s scientific and technological development strategy currently to promote “organized research” in international collaboration, and to coordinate the free exploration of scientists with the national strategic goals. From the perspective of the synergetic theory and through an empirical investigation of 10 international collaboration projects relying on China’s universities, the study found that organized research in international collaboration has three aspects of connotation, which are values, knowledge characteristics and organizational forms. On this basis, the study analyzed the current problems and strategies of organized research in international collaboration of Chinese universities. The research proposed to build an innovation community on the basis of openness, trust and sharing, identify the focus of the organizational system to coordinate the interests and needs of different subjects, strengthen the linkage between international scientific research collaboration and talent training advantages, and improve the scientific research evaluation and management system.

Based on the grounded theory and empirical data of two modern industrial colleges in Jiangsu Province and Guangdong Province, this research constructs the evolution characteristics of legitimacy and extracts its dynamic acquisition mechanism. It has found that: first, the acquisition of the legitimacy is dynamical, regulatory legitimacy and relationship legitimacy are gained by the conformance strategy during the preparation phase, normative legitimacy and pragmatic legitimacy are gained by the conformance strategy and manipulation strategy during the initiating phase, and social legitimacy and regulatory legitimacy are gained by the manipulation strategy during the maturation phase. Second, there are differences in different legitimacy acquisition processes, regulatory legitimacy is obtained through policy response mechanism and multiple bargaining mechanism, normative legitimacy and pragmatic legitimacy are obtained through normative governance mechanism and innovation mechanism, and relationship legitimacy, pragmatic legitimacy and social legitimacy are obtained through the coordination mechanism and dissemination mechanism. The theoretical explanation of the practice of the legitimacy acquisition of modern industrial college can provide a useful reference for the government, universities and enterprises to jointly promote the high-quality development of modern industrial colleges.

The legislative path is the original problem of codification, and the legislative path of Education Code is the primary problem to be solved in the process of codification. The legislative path of Education Code mainly studies the important issues such as the legislative orientation, legislative model and legislative main line of Education Code. The legislative orientation of the Education Code should be the domain code, which has five elements: the collection of legal subjects, the complexity of legal relations, the domain of legal responsibilities, the expansion of the scope of adjustment, and the cross-departmental complexity. The legislative model of the Education Code should be formulated in essence to construct a new Education Code based on the interaction between educational norms and educational structures. The main line of the legislation of the Education Code should be the relationship in the field of education. According to the theory of the complete elements of the relationship in the field of education, the design basis of the legislative style of the Education Code is taken.

In the compilation of the Education Code, no matter what form is finally adopted, the systematic construction of criminal liability of education law is a task that must be accomplished. There are a large number of criminal provisions in China’s education law, covering a wide range of offences, but there are problems such as unbalanced protection of legal interests, inconsistent standards of delimitation of the criminal circle, chaotic arrangement of the system, and poor connection with other department of laws, coupled with the deficiencies of the criminal law itself in the field of education, have rendered the criminal liability of the education law unable to reach the requirements of systematization. Germany’s system of criminal liability in education law has certain significance for China, such as in the protection of legal interests and the legislative model. China’s criminal liability in education law should be systematically constructed in terms of both substance and form. Substantively, on the basis of a unified legislative starting point and value, the fundamental status of safeguarding citizens’ right to education should be clarified, and the safeguard of basic rights under criminal law should be transformed into a two-tiered legal interest in education, so as to build a substantive criminal law network. Formally, it is necessary to make comprehensive use of the diversified legislative model, and to sort out the relationship between the Education Code and the Education Single Law, the Penal Code and the Education Code, as well as the part of the criminal liability section of the Education Code and the other chapters.

Article 40 of the academic degree law empowers degree applicants with the right of academic review through the innovative design of the academic review system, but the incompleteness of relevant laws and regulations makes the academic review right vulnerable to the substantive restrictions of degree-granting units, and the non-independence risk of the academic review system thus appears. The independence theory of academic review system can effectively respond to the theoretical disputes of academic review system and promote the better prevention and resolution of degree disputes, and has a certain theoretical and normative basis. In order to ensure the independent exercise of academic review right and the fair operation of academic review procedure, it is necessary to take the procedural subject status of degree applicants as the logical premise to fully construct the independence theory of academic review system. Complete mechanisms for withdrawal, academic review restriction and evaluation review mechanism should be systematized, degree applicants should be explicitly allowed to seek external relief, and the relevant relief authorities should focus on the independence of the academic review process.

Dissertations are important scientific research achievements. Effective management of dissertations helps to promote the utilization of the scientific research results. Current dissertation management system has a series of problems such as weak legal basis for deposit, a risk of copyright infringement in communication, and lack of effective distribution mechanism. In view of the above problems, we can revise the mechanism for the deposit of dissertations by amending the Academic Degrees Law; We can also promote the distribution and utilization of dissertations by amending the Copyright Law and refining the licensing procedures.

Social media is widely used in doctoral students. 716 academic doctoral students were studied to explore the influence of social media use motivation and addiction on doctoral students’ academic innovation ability, and the mediating role of social-emotional competence and attention failure. The results showed that some social media addictions exist among the doctoral student population; there are differences in demographic variables such as gender and motivation for doctoral studies; motivation for social media use (cognitive and hedonic) and addiction significantly positively and negatively predicted doctoral students’ academic innovation ability, respectively, with openness to experience, emotional stability and attention failure mediating this predictive relationship. Therefore, colleges and universities should pay attention to the status quo and underlying causes of doctoral students’ social media addiction, pay attention to the construction of good mentoring relationship and students’ academic progress, and pay attention to the cultivation of social-emotional competence among doctoral students.

The quality of personnel training is related to the high-quality development of higher vocational education, and is the basis of measuring the core competitiveness of higher vocational schools. In order to fully display the quality of talents training in higher vocational education with Chinese characteristics, the paper adopts the method of factor analysis from three dimensions of talent training input, process and output, to construct an evaluation index system of talent training quality covering 10 secondary indicators and 34 tertiary indicators, and to quantitatively analyze the quality of talent training in 1 367 higher vocational schools in 31 provinces. It is found that the talent cultivation index of higher vocational education in our country shows the phenomenon of “east high and west low”. The problem of unbalanced and insufficient development between regions, provinces and schools is more prominent. Therefore, this paper puts forward the ways to improve the quality of vocational education personnel training, which are: to strengthen the cooperation between the east, the middle and the west and promote the flow and sharing of resources; to further deepen the integration of industry and education and accelerate the formation of a multi-input mechanism; to form an evaluation mechanism of talent cultivation results oriented by upgrading technical skill level and employment quality.

The layout of vocational education at the higher level is related to the integrity of the modern vocational education system and the diversity of the universalization phase of higher education. In Germany, vocational education has a hybrid form and an independent form at the higher level. The former is a vocational-academic hybrid education aimed at granting (initial) vocational qualifications and academic qualifications at the same time, represented by the dual higher education; the latter is the advanced vocational education that focuses on the German advanced vocational qualifications, with a coherent vocational advancement path and a three-level qualification system. Germany hopes to create a “higher vocational education and training” brand by using the title of “professional expert-professional bachelor-professional master”. The layout of higher forms of vocational education in Germany can provide reflections on the functional orientation and level division of vocational education for the construction of “vocational education at undergraduate level” in China.

Switzerland is moving towards a permeable vocational education and training (VET) system through reforms such as the Federal Vocational Baccalaureate, with the aim of guaranteeing learners’ right to an individualized education, meeting the economic and social demand for a highly skilled workforce, promoting lifelong learning for all and ensuring equity in education. A number of laws have been adopted to clarify the meaning and status of the concept of permeability in the Swiss VET system, which is firmly rooted in its own identity and committed to achieving permeability at different levels within it. In order to provide more flexible learning pathways and lifelong learning for all, the Swiss VET system also focuses on permeability with general education and the recognition of informal learning outcomes.