How Can the Government Promote Sustainable Cooperation between Schools and Enterprises? A Quadrilateral Evolutionary Game Study

Sustainable cooperation between schools and enterprises is crucial to maintaining a dynamic balance between the supply and demand of talents and driving the advancement of new quality productive forces. As a result, facilitating school–enterprise cooperation has become an important concern in many countries. However, there remains a gap in understanding the approaches taken by central and local governments to foster such cooperation through the lens of evolutionary game theory. Therefore, this paper develops a quadrilateral evolutionary game model involving schools, enterprises, the central government, and local governments by building the payoff matrix and calculating expected payoffs of different strategies to analyze the conditions under which governments can effectively promote school–enterprise cooperation. Our findings indicate that benefit is a decisive factor that affects the strategies of all parties. Increasing incentives and penalties from the central government and local governments can stimulate school–enterprise cooperation, but these measures are not sustainable in the long term. Additionally, the impact of the central government’s incentives and penalties on local governments in promoting school–enterprise cooperation is limited. Enhancing policy efficacy and the practical outcomes of school–enterprise cooperation is essential, which not only strengthens the bond between schools and enterprises but also ensures deep and enduring governmental involvement. Some suggestions are put forward at the end.