Abstract: Amid the ongoing transformation and upgrading of global industrial structures,promoting the typological development of undergraduate vocational education has become a key strategy to meet the urgent demand for high-level technical and skilled personnel.Drawing on new institutionalism,this study constructs an analytical framework based on the interaction between institutional environment and actor strategies to examine the institutional mechanisms behind the differentiated development of undergraduate vocational education in the UK and Germany.The findings reveal that multi disciplinary technical colleges in the UK are deeply mired in the dilemma of “academic drift”,which is rooted in regulatory,normative,and cultural cognitive institutional elements that jointly guide academic logic,prompting institutions to obtain legitimacy by imitating academic universities.In contrast,the key to German universities of applied sciences being able to construct and develop a “career oriented” system relies on the synergy of three types of institutional elements to support career logic,stimulate institutional entrepreneurship behavior between state governments and universities,and gradually establish the inherent legitimacy of the vocational education system.On this basis,this article proposes that China needs to strengthen the continuity and leadership of the top-level design of the central government,enhance the overall coordination ability of provincial governments,promote vocational undergraduate colleges to reconstruct their education and research models in the deep integration of “vocation” and “higher education”,and systematically solve the legitimacy dilemma of type education.

Key words: undergraduate vocational education, academic drift, vocational orientation, institutional mechanism, implications for China