In accordance with the Ministry of Education’s work arrangements for implementing the Master Plan on Building China into a Leading Country in Education, the China Association of Higher Education (CAHE) organized a research advancement conference on construction a leading country in education. CAHE will uphold the mission of serving national strategic needs by deepening higher education research, building and refining a?collaborative innovation system, strengthening?organized research, fostering an?academic ethos of applying knowledge to practice, transforming research paradigms, and producing?high-quality innovative achievements. These efforts aim to support reform and development practices, pool resources, energize innovation, and contribute to the high-quality development of higher education. Through these actions, CAHE strives to better serve national strategies and advance the construction a leading country in education.

China’s talent cultivation models demonstrate typological diversity and complex evolutionary paths. From the dual tension perspective of “local-international” and “traditional-innovative”, the talent cultivation models of Chinese universities can be identified as four ideal types: “international academic inheritance”, “international innovation leading”, “local cultural preservation” and “local innovation priority”. These types have a dynamic, interactive evolution driven by multiple factors such as disciplinary development needs and national policy guidance. Talent cultivation models in Chinese universities should balance global competition and local adaptation, as well as knowledge accumulation and innovative breakthroughs, to achieve the functional and strategic positioning of China’s higher education development.

The establishment of excellent class is the key measure to implement Outstanding Engineer Education and Training Program, and its specific impact on the development of engineering students’ ability needs to be further explored. Based on the data of national engineering student survey, this study uses the methods of difference analysis and structural equation model to explore whether the excellent class obtains the relative advantage of the improvement of students’ problem-solving ability through the “screening” or the “cultivating”. The results indicate that students in excellent classes demonstrate significantly higher problem-solving abilities than their peers in regular classes. The effect of “screening” mechanism is more powerful than that of “cultivating” effect. A key factor contributing to the limited effectiveness of the “cultivating”mechanism is the lack of synergy between classroom instruction, institutional practice resources, and students’ learning engagement. Therefore, it is necessary to change the cultivation mode of outstanding talents with emphasis on selection and light cultivation, rationally strengthen the echelon of college resources, and strengthening the tripartite coupling mechanism of “classroom teaching-institutional resources-learning engagement”, thereby promoting a qualitative transformation in the development of top engineering talent.

Modern education often pursues “excellence” in a secular sense, neglecting the focus on the “individual” itself. Based on meritocracy theory, this study employs qualitative interviews to reveal how evaluation mechanisms in “Double First-Class” construction universities contribute to undergraduates’ self-alienation. The research finds that meritocracy disciplines students through a three-dimensional system of symbolic governance, tournament allocation, and competitive ethics cultivation, leading to strategic survival performances characterized by passive discipline and active conformity. Through dependent behaviors such as strategic obedience, instrumental survival, and social capital accumulation, students alienate the educational field into a competitive arena for resource acquisition. Under the combined influence of institutional coercion and behavioral alienation, students fall into an existential crisis of subjectivity dissolution, emotional resource depletion, and value nihilism. To break through the institutional predicament of individual alienation, it is necessary to return to the essence of education, optimize the student evaluation system, construct a social cognitive support system, and foster an inclusive growth environment, aiming to promote the free and comprehensive development of students.

Breaking the “Western path dependence” in cultivating top-notch innovative talents and establishing an independent cultivation mechanism for top-notch innovative talents with Chinese characteristics have become key breakthroughs in achieving high-level scientific and technological self-reliance and self-strengthening. To promote the independent cultivation of top-notch innovative talents in China, it is necessary to further rationalize the theoretical logic of policy support, so as to achieve the enhancement of autonomy from “external introduction” to “strengthening self-sufficiency”, the innovative positioning from “passive catching up” to “leading the sprint”, and the differentiated development from “uniformity” to “precise classification”. However, in the practical process, there are still many difficulties in relevant policy support, including homogenization of support, insufficient attention to the differences among different types of talents; intermittent support, the policy continuity throughout the entire process of talent cultivation needs to be improved; fragmented support, the collaborative education synergy among multiple subjects is insufficient; passive support, the dynamic mechanism of independent innovation is not sound. To promote the adaptation of relevant policies, we must adhere to the thinking of precise governance, and facilitate the diversified development of top-notch innovative talents through classified support, integrated support, collaborative support, and special support.

The digital competency level of university teachers is an important indicator to measure the success of digital transformation in colleges and universities, which is deeply influenced by teachers’ subjective level. Through a questionnaire survey of 853 teachers in 21 universities in 13 provinces, it is found that both formal and informal perceived social support can positively promote the digital competence of university teachers, and the promotion effect of formal perceived social support is more significant. In addition, psychological empowerment and technology acceptance play an important mediating role in the relationship between perceived social support and digital competence of college teachers. In order to accelerate the improvement of digital competence of empowering university teachers, it is suggested to strengthen the overall planning of resources to build a comprehensive “formal support” social network, create an emotional support atmosphere to create a symbiotic “informal” social support ecology, deepen psychological empowerment and accurately support “technologically disadvantaged” university teachers, and improve the transformation efficiency of social support resources.

As the main body of higher education development in our country, the level of young teachers’teaching input has an important influence on the quality of education, teaching and talent cultivation in a wide sense. However, compared with high-level universities under ministries and commissions, local universities still have fundamental differences in resource endowment, evaluation mechanism, environment and ecology, especially the support and improvement of young teachers’teaching input is still in a relatively backward state of development. Based on the grounded theory, it is found that the interaction between teaching environment and teaching literacy is an important factor affecting the teaching input of young teachers in local universities. It is necessary to improve the teaching input of young teachers by optimizing the three-dimensional support system of teaching environment and building an enabling ecosystem for the improvement of teaching literacy, so as to effectively improve the quality of education, teaching and talent cultivation.

With the rise of the group nature of the “Global South”, the global higher education governance system is shifting from the dominance of the north to a new pattern of “joint governance between the Global North and South”. The participation of the “Global South” in the global higher education governance system has mainly gone through four stages: initial participation, regional response, deepening of multilateral cooperation and upgrading of strategic cooperation. In the process, the “Global South” has promoted the institutional innovation of the governance system in the fields of global higher education governance subjects, governance standards, governance certification, and governance sharing through the reconstruction of new rules in the dimensions of quality standards, talent mobility, trade in educational services, and digital education governance. As an important member of the “Global South”, China has played an important role as an exchange negotiator, brand communicator, and experience sharer in the global higher education governance system.

Article 37(3) of the Academic Degrees Law serves as a catch-all provision for revoking academic degrees, covering both academic and non-academic grounds. By linking revocation grounds to the conditions required for initial degree conferment, the clause allows any breach of those conditions to potentially trigger revocation proceedings. However, actual revocation is warranted only when the conduct constitutes a “serious violation”. For academic misconduct, a “serious violation” must satisfy all three criteria: (a) the conduct falls within a category that university rules deem disqualifying for degree conferment; (b) the offending research output has been publicly disseminated; and (c) the conduct involves ghost-writing, plagiarism, or other forms of academic dishonesty of comparable severity. Serious non-academic breaches involve violations of the political or moral prerequisites for degree conferment. A serious political breach must constitute a crime of a political nature under the Criminal Law. A serious moral breach must violate either the Criminal Law or the Public Security Administration Punishments Law and be morally reprehensible. Crucially, revocation is justified only when such misconduct infringes upon the legal interests protected by the Academic Degrees Law, as manifested by causing significant negative social impact or seriously damaging the university’s reputation.

With the rapid development of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) technology, China has entered a new stage of high-quality development. While enhancing production efficiency across industries, the application of GAI has also introduced educational risks. In higher education, the involvement of Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC) in academic theses has increasingly been criticized for enabling academic misconduct such as ghostwriting, plagiarism, and fabrication. Based on an analysis of GAI’s underlying architecture, generative AI is essentially a logical computing tool devoid of autonomous intent. Research on generative AI should adopt an instrumentalist perspective. In reality, AIGC’s involvement in academic theses does not equate to other person’s writing, but its improper citation practices and inherent flaws may lead to plagiarism and fabrication. Based on the reality of anomie in the integrity of a comprehensive ban, the governance of AIGC should be shifted to standardized use. At the institutional response level, the following measures should be prioritized: strengthen explicit labeling mechanisms for GAI; clarify the verification obligations of degree applicants regarding AIGC; implement strict evaluation criteria by degree review committees to ensure academic integrity.

In the context of the codification of education law, it is particularly crucial to conduct in-depth research on the theoretical basis and practical logic of the academic appeal system. The compilation of the Education Code has put forward systematic requirements for safeguarding students’ academic rights and interests, emphasizing more on standardization, proceduralization, and the pursuit of fairness and justice values. Through in-depth analysis of the regulations of 45 “Double First-Class” construction universities, the shortcomings of the current internal appeal mechanism for university students have been revealed, including the scope of acceptance is restricted, the accepting institution suffers from administrative dependency flaws, procedural shortcomings impair fairness, and the dispute resolution mechanism experiences institutional inertia. In the context of codification, the path to improving the academic appeal system should include expanding the scope of appeal acceptance within schools, clarifying appeal acceptance institutions, improving due process, and promote substantive resolution of academic disputes, etc.

In response to the requirements of high-quality construction of modern vocational education system, China timely promotes the pilot construction of vocational undergraduate education, guides eligible colleges to implement organizational transformation pilot to promote the adjustment of modern vocational education level structure and the reshaping of classified development pattern, with organizational autonomy and experimental spontaneity as the logical destination. The key behavioral characteristics of pilot construction in terms of division of labor evolution can be explained by the theory of division of labor and organizational experimentation. By combining the results of the pilot development of 10 typical vocational and technical universities with 198 policy texts of central and local vocational undergraduate education pilot programs, it is possible to identify the operational difficulties of pilot organizations and the inherent limitations of the experimental governance field. To achieve deep innovation experiments in vocational undergraduate education in its true sense, it is necessary for pilot organizations to focus on specific role positioning to enhance their effective knowledge and experience generation and accumulation. It is also necessary to adjust the pilot construction environment through overall guidance, institutional guarantees, and effective markets, and ultimately form a positive cycle effect of collective experimental interaction strengthening.