Collaboration with Industry in Chinese Higher Education: Evaluation Based on a Matter-element Model

The present paper aims to construct a comprehensive evaluation system and propose an effective, objective method to evaluate the quality of university-industry collaboration.First, based on total quality management theory, an evaluation index system or complex is designed to cover the whole progression of input, process, and output of UIC.Second, the analytic hierarchical process is employed to calculate the weights of the indexes, and an evaluation matter-element model is developed to assess UIC quality levels on the concrete indexes.There are two main advantages of the UIC evaluation matter-element model: (1) It makes deep comparison of the indexes achieving the same evaluation level among different UICs; (2) It discovers the possibility of being converted into the corresponding level on a certain index based on K-values.Finally, four UICs in China were assessed by employing the matter-element evaluation tool developed in this research, and make further comparisons of the four UICs.