This paper constructs a “one body, two wings” model for modern vocational education and explores the status of industry-education integration in the implementation of this model, specifically the coupling and coordination mechanism between higher education and industrial development. Using the entropy method, a system evaluation indicator system for higher education and industrial development was constructed. Methods such as the global Moran index, Dagum Gini coefficient, kernel density method, and Tobit regression model were employed to investigate the characteristics and influencing factors of the coupling and coordination level between higher education and industrial development. The coupling degree between the two systems has remained stable, consistently maintaining a high coupling range of 0.9–1.0 since 2018, indicating a strong association between the higher vocational education system and the industrial development system. At the same time, the degree of coordination between the two systems basically showed a phased trend of first declining and then rebounding, falling from 0.673 in 2018 to 0.571 in 2021, and then rising to 0.683 in 2024. In addition, there are obvious spatial agglomeration and spatial heterogeneity in the coupling and coordination degree of China’s higher vocational education and industrial development systems, which shows a gradient development pattern from southeast to northwest on the whole, and the coupling and coordinated development gradually evolves to multipolarization. There is a significant positive correlation between industrial structure upgrading, regional economic development level, and coupling coordination degree, while there is a significant negative correlation between local employment rate and coupling coordination degree.
