Abstract: Higher vocational specialty setup is the starting point for higher vocational colleges to carry out education and teaching, industry transformation and upgrading and economic structure adjustment. Through combing and analyzing the research literature of the specialty setup model in higher vocational colleges for more than ten years, it is found that the commonness and key of the specialty setup model is to construct a perfect index system. The precision of the model can be improved from the index content, index weight,and the theoretical method of model construction. Based on the research status and problems, combined with the requirements of connotation development of higher vocational colleges, the specialty setup model construction of higher vocational colleges in the future will pay more attention to practice test, focus more on the connotation requirements of evaluation, and pay more attention to the construction of specialty group setup model.