An integrated framework for evaluating sustainable outcomes of vocational college graduates under ethnic heterogeneity and unequal college level resource allocation

In ethnically diverse regions, sustainable employment and entrepreneurship outcomes for vocational college graduates are constrained by two structural challenges: (i) pronounced heterogeneity across ethnic groups in cultural background, social capital, and development pathways, and (ii) unequal allocation of college-level resources that widens disparities in capability development and opportunity access. Their interaction amplifies outcome heterogeneity and increases the complexity of sustainability-oriented evaluation. To address this, we propose an integrated assessment framework combining Dual-Dimension Enhanced Pattern Rule Recognition (D-DEPRR) and a Factor Contribution Measurement (FCM) model. The framework identifies weakly expressed yet high-impact factors and quantifies their influence under heterogeneous ethnic and institutional conditions. Using survey data from 1,979 graduating students at a vocational college in an ethnic minority region of China, we benchmark the proposed approach against LSTM, BPNN, and SVM. Results show consistent improvements in ROC-AUC, PR-AUC, MCC, and Brier score, together with enhanced interpretability for key sustainability drivers. Findings indicate that intrinsic motivation and skill acquisition are core dimensions supporting sustainable outcomes. In addition, low-frequency support-related factors, including ethnically targeted guidance services and unequal access to institutional resources, exert disproportionately large impacts on minority student subgroups.