Emerging engineering education is a new form of engineering education development. Graduate education in urban and rural planning needs to be reformed in response to the strategic choice of emerging engineering education. Certain studies have been carried out to figure out the philosophy and methodology of graduate education in urban and rural planning in the context of emerging engineering education. However, a systematic analysis is lacking. This study conducts a qualitative analysis on the relevant literature by NVivo software. It is found that studies focus on the basic requirements, existing problems and optimization strategies. Among them, the basic requirements and optimization strategies are attached more attention. With the development of emerging engineering education, optimizing the cultivating mode, innovating the teaching system, strengthening the construction of teaching staff and improving the supporting conditions are important for graduate education in urban and rural planning. Future studies can deepen the analysis of the existing problems, strengthen the comparative analysis of different cases and conduct tracking research, so as to improve the scientificity and universality of the research results.