Ethnic music education in college music education is crucial to transmitting ethnic music culture. Based on the K-means algorithm and XGBoost algorithm in big data algorithm, this paper begins with the concept of folk music as “culture” and the theoretical basis of folk music education in colleges and universities as a preliminary theoretical preparation for the research. Through a questionnaire survey and data analysis of music majors and teachers in several colleges and universities in Liaoning Province that offer “folk music” courses, we summarize and analyze the current problems in teaching folk music and propose countermeasures for cultural inheritance. The analysis shows that people generally prefer popular music, and their liking for folk music is generally low, among which only Shenyang Normal College has more students who like folk music, 61%, and the least is Bohai University, only 4%. At the end of this paper, three corresponding reference countermeasures are proposed, including the establishment of multicultural awareness, a scientific and open concept, and the principles of folk music culture inheritance, which have implications for the inheritance of folk music culture.