The postgraduate education has gone into a new era of structural adjustment with the coming of the concept of emerging engineering education. However, the quality of postgraduate education in civil and hydraulic engineering has been affected by various factors and the quality has declined. A questionnaire survey is employed in this paper to collect the current development status of postgraduates of civil engineering and hydraulic engineering in Fujian Agricultural and Forestry University on a basis of the characteristics and basic conditions of agriculture and forestry universities. Meanwhile, a gray-scale prediction model is introduced to predict the future trend of the collected monitoring data. The results show that the innovation and practice level of postgraduate students in civil and hydraulic engineering has greatly declined and foreign language ability has not enhanced yet. To address these issues, various improvement measures and suggestions for innovation ability, practice level and foreign language ability are proposed in this paper with focuses on universities and teachers. This study really reveals current problems of postgraduate students in civil and hydraulic engineering to an extent. In addition, a quality improvement method in line with the concept of emerging engineering education is proposed to solve these problems, which benefits colleges and universities to cultivate high-quality civil and hydraulic engineering professionals with perspectives of the future development pattern.