With the ongoing reform of higher education, the University Practice Education Community (UPEC) has become a crucial platform for advancing collaborative education and innovating talent cultivation models. However, research remains insufficient on the influencing factors of UPEC’s sustainable development and, in particular, on how these factors interact with one another. From a complex systems perspective, this study conceptualizes UPEC as a dynamic and interconnected system in which multiple factors jointly shape sustainability outcomes. Accordingly, the overall objective is to (i) identify key influencing factors, (ii) model and quantify their interrelationships, and (iii) pinpoint critical factors and interaction pathways that structure UPEC sustainability. Adopting this holistic view, we integrate literature review, expert interviews, questionnaire surveys, and social network analysis (SNA) to systematically identify and analyze twenty influencing factors. SNA, as a systems-oriented analytical tool, enables the mapping of structural relationships and interaction pathways among factors, revealing how these interdependencies collectively form the governance ecosystem of UPEC. The results identify eight key factors—including willingness for multi-stakeholder collaboration, stability of cooperation mechanisms, policy and institutional support, effectiveness of communication and coordination mechanisms, feedback and improvement mechanisms, enthusiasm of industry and enterprise participation, local government support, and influence of public opinion—along with five critical paths linking subsystems through chain effects. Based on this diagnostic evidence, this study further outlines strategy implications to support practice-oriented improvement, while the primary contribution remains the identification of key factors and critical interaction structures underlying UPEC sustainability.
Wu et al. (Sat,) studied this question.