On December 7th, 2022, the 4th Presidents Seminar of the Sino-Finnish Universities of Applied Sciences was held online, jointly hosted by China Education Association for International Exchange (CEAIE) and the Rectors’ Conference of Finnish Universities of Applied Sciences (ARENE), co-organized by China Center for International Educational Exchange (CCIEE). Participants included An Yan (Deputy Secretary-general of CEAIE) and Mervi Vidgrén (President of ARENE), together with a dozen of Chinese and Finnish partner institutes.

The seminar focused on “Further promoting industry-university-research collaborations to cultivate high-quality application-oriented talents”. Zheng Feng, the CPC Standing Committee member and Vice President of NJIT, attended the meeting and delivered a keynote speech. Prof. Zheng gave a speech entitled “Taking Root in Industries, Integrating Education with Industries—Innovating the Cultivation Mode for High-quality Application-oriented Talents”, introducing the distinctive characteristics of NJIT’s demand-oriented education philosophy that focuses on cultivating high-quality application-oriented talents and aims to promote university-enterprise cooperation and collaborative cultivation. He said that NJIT has always been acting in accordance with the motto of “Learning for Application” and the spirit of “Integrating Knowledge and Practice, Inspiring Entrepreneurship and Innovation”, considering the cultivation of high-quality application-oriented engineering talents unviersity’s top priority; dedicated to achieving deep integration of the university and enterprises and cultivating high-quality application-oriented talents together based on the idea of “Strengthening Collaborative Education” and multi-dimensional cooperation; integrating education with industries and establishing a new cooperative cultivation mechanism and mode by dint of “the whole-process participation of industries” and the building of a multi-field modern industrial college; and actively promoting the reform of “Innovative Education”, energizing “teaching” and “learning” activities, and exploring and implementing a new mode of talent cultivation in emerging engineering education.

At the meeting, An Yan (Deputy Secretary-general of CEAIE) and Dr. Mervi Vidgrén (President of ARENE) delivered speeches respectively. They said that the professional development-oriented talent cultivation model has been popularized in Finland for more than three decades, and there are also many HEIs in China that have achieved outstanding achievements in this field. It is hoped that the seminar can serve as a boost for more educational exchanges, underpin and promote existing cooperation between China and Finland, and advance the development of global industry-university-research collaborations, thus writing a new chapter of Sino-Finnish university cooperation.