As an integral part of national education, water education is a crucial guarantee for the sustainable development of the ecological environment, and higher education institutions serving as essential platforms for its implementation. Through the questionnaire survey and interviews of water-related universities in Jiangsu, it is found that Jiangsu water-related universities have made remarkable progress in the aspects of educational organizational structure, educational content design, teaching method selection, educational evaluation and incentive application, and educational effectiveness, and have initially realized the systematic construction of water education. However, in practice, there are still some problems, such as the imperfect educational organization mechanism, the low adaptability of educational content and methods, the emphasis on knowledge transfer over skill training in educational evaluation, the incompatibility between educational incentives and students' needs, and the unbalanced development of students’ water literacy. From the perspective of the high-quality development of water education in Jiangsu, this paper proposes an innovative path for the practice of water education in water-related universities, including the establishment of a cross-departmental coordination mechanism and information sharing platform, innovation of education content and methods, improvement of evaluation system, optimization of incentive mechanism, and use of digital tools to promote modern teaching, so as to improve the scientificity, pertinence and effectiveness of water education, and provide strong support for cultivating talents with comprehensive water literacy in the new era.