Urban and rural planning is an interdisciplinary and practice-oriented applied discipline, in which practical teaching and final-year projects serve as the core components for assessing the effectiveness of undergraduate education. Against the backdrop of disciplinary convergence and the new engineering education initiative, joint thesis designs in urban and rural planning have become a vital vehicle for inter-institutional exchange, teaching reform and disciplinary development. Drawing on online data collection and practical experience, this paper systematically reviews the implementation of joint thesis designs in urban and rural planning across the country in recent years. Joint thesis designs in China began in 2011. The initiative launched in 2013 by six universities, including Tsinghua University, set a precedent, and since 2017, a three-tiered nested network of educational collaboration—comprising national, regional and provincial levels—has gradually taken shape. By the end of 2024, there were over 20 national joint graduation project alliances, covering more than 100 universities across 28 provinces and municipalities. Of the 61 universities that have passed professional accreditation, 53 are participating in these initiatives; however, the academic community has yet to conduct systematic research on the implementation of joint thesis designs nationwide. To this end, taking the period from 2011 to 2024 as the research timeframe and 2024 as the key node, the study utilized Ucinet 6.0 software to construct a university cooperation network. A systematic analysis was conducted across dimensions including temporal evolution, spatial distribution, network relationships, core characteristics and development trends, aiming to reveal the developmental patterns of joint thesis designs and provide references for promoting their high-quality development and reforming urban and rural planning education. The research findings indicate that, over time, the number of times universities participated in joint thesis designs has shown rapid linear growth, rising from 7 instances in 2011 to 184 in 2024. The widespread adoption of online teaching during the pandemic further accelerated this expansion. National consortia were the first to establish a stable teaching framework, whilst regional and provincial consortia have developed rapidly since 2016; the three complement and support the diversified development of planning education nationwide. In the spatial dimension, participating universities exhibit distinct patterns of differentiation and regional clustering. Participation is particularly high in eastern regions such as Beijing, Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Guangdong, whilst central and western regions including Shaanxi, Sichuan, Chongqing and Hunan have performed notably well. Significant clustering effects are evident in regions such as the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, Yangtze River Delta, Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao, Chengdu-Chongqing and Shaanxi-Gansu clusters. Social network analysis shows that each university undertakes different link functions in the network, and the degree centrality can effectively reflect the breadth of university cooperation. Some non-traditional universities have become the core nodes of the network with high participation and openness. The degree centrality level is significantly positively correlated with the passing rate of professional evaluation. The passing rate of high centrality universities is 92.8%, which plays a leading role in the joint completion. In terms of network density, the density of the national consortium is 0.2460, the structure is close and stable, and constitutes the overall network skeleton; after superimposing regional and provincial networks, the overall density drops to 0.1037, showing an unbalanced state. In terms of core characteristics, national-level joint thesis designs are guided by innovation and cutting-edge exploration, benchmarking against international standards and focusing on complex issues such as urban regeneration and heritage conservation; regional and provincial-level joint thesis designs, on the other hand, are rooted in local characteristics and closely aligned with regional development strategies—for instance, the Chengdu-Chongqing region focuses on rural revitalization, whilst the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area explores spatial collaborative governance. The study further identifies three major development trends: firstly, a shift from discipline-centric approaches to cross-disciplinary collaboration, with the professional composition expanding from a single discipline of planning to a multidisciplinary matrix encompassing urban planning, architecture, landscape architecture, geographic information systems and environmental studies; secondly, a transition from inter-institutional cooperation to a multi-faceted integration of industry-education and government-university partnerships; thirdly, an upgrade from technical training to a response to national strategies, with project themes shifting from traditional spatial design to align with national strategies such as rural revitalization, regional coordination, the “dual carbon” goals and healthy cities. Lastly, this paper suggests ways to improve the teaching quality of joint thesis designs: changing the pedagogical philosophy from a “teacher-student” relationship to “co-production of knowledge”; changing the teaching methods from one-way instruction to collaborative innovation; changing the teaching content from incremental planning to improving the quality of current developments; changing the course topics from grand narratives to a human-centered approach; and changing the career orientation from spatial form to integrated governance. In order to promote a thorough advancement in undergraduate urban and rural planning education, this change seeks to conform to the demands of the Central Urban Work Conference and the emergence of new engineering specialties while consistently improving cooperative mechanisms and instructional efficacy.