Vocational Education Serving County Economies Under Rural Revitalization: A Coupling Mechanism and High-Quality Development Pathways in Shaanxi, China

Rural revitalization has been designated a national strategy in China since 2017, and the county (xianyu) has been identified as the pivotal spatial unit linking urban and rural development. Vocational education, by supplying skilled human capital and applied technologies, is expected to act as a driving force for county economic development. Yet empirical and theoretical understanding of how vocational education couples with county economies—particularly in less-developed western provinces—remains limited. Drawing on human capital theory, growth pole theory, the triple helix model, and coupling coordination theory, this paper develops a conceptual framework of the vocational education–county economy nexus and illustrates it through five documented county-level cases in Shaanxi Province. The analysis identifies four linkage channels—talent, technology, industry, and culture—through which vocational education mediates rural revitalization, and shows that effective coupling depends on aligning specialty provision with local industrial structure, embedding training in real production chains, and mobilizing multi-agent governance. The paper also surfaces persistent barriers, including the spatial concentration of high-quality resources in cities, mismatches between curricula and county needs, and weak implementation mechanisms. It concludes with differentiated policy pathways for sinking vocational education resources to counties and for building industry-education communities. The study contributes to the literature by theorizing the coupling mechanism at the county scale and by providing transferable evidence from a western Chinese context.