Functional Embeddedness: Interlinking Government and University in Graduate Engineering Education in China

The current graduate education model for engineering professional degrees faces numerous challenges. Based on embeddedness theory, this research constructs a bidirectional embeddedness model of university and government functions across four dimensions: structure, cognition, culture, and politics. Through the case study of Yanlong Lake Institute of Advanced Technology, this study analyses how local application-oriented universities achieve the mutual embedding of government and university functions in the process of cultivating engineering professional degree graduate students. The research reveals that the transformation of governmental and university roles from ‘separate responsibilities’ to ‘co-governance with shared authority and accountability’ and ‘commensurate authority and responsibility’, along with interactive and consistent functional embeddedness, facilitates bidirectional benefit acquisition for both the government and universities. This synergy further enhances the training quality of engineering professional degree graduates, thereby more effectively promoting graduate education in the new era.