Aligning postgraduate education with industry: a tripartite quality assurance model for interdisciplinary talent development

Traditional university-enterprise partnerships face challenges of fragmented oversight and skill mismatches. This study addresses these issues by incorporating industry associations as third-party mediators with dual public-private attributes for quality assurance in interdisciplinary postgraduate education. Grounded in Stakeholder Theory, the framework resolves systemic challenges through three core innovations: Institutionalizing recursive feedback mechanisms connecting policy interpretation, competency validation, and innovation diffusion; Operationalizing the PDCA cycle to synchronize educational objectives with industrial advancements; and Establishing bidirectional accountability channels among universities, enterprises, and associations to align educational outputs with market demands. A robotics education case study demonstrates empirical validation of measurable outcomes: graduates achieved salaries 29% above provincial averages, secured 139 provincial/national innovation awards, and obtained $1.37 million in collaborative R&D funding. These achievements validate the model's effectiveness in bridging academia and industry sectors via policy alignment, resource integration, and dynamic feedback mechanisms. Association-led coordination effectively cultivates interdisciplinary talent while driving technological progress. This paradigm provides a replicable blueprint for enhancing postgraduate education, with implications for aligning higher education globally with industrial modernization.