China’s universities are undertaking a massive reshuffling of their academic offerings as part of a drive to better align higher education with the nation’s development goals – culling thousands of so-called obsolete degrees in favor of new, tech-focused programs. The sweeping campaign comes as China races to become a global leader in hi-tech “future industries” and solve a severe graduate job crisis, which has left millions of young people struggling to find work.
Between 2021 and 2025, China’s higher education institutions revoked or suspended 12,200 undergraduate degree programs while introducing 10,200 new ones, meaning that more than 30% of the nation’s university programs underwent adjustments, according to the Ministry of Education. The cuts have been heavily concentrated in arts, humanities, foreign languages and management – fields that are increasingly deemed outdated or oversaturated in China.
Many of the new programs are closely aligned with Beijing’s economic development goals. For instance, nine universities have added new majors in embodied intelligence, which dovetails with a national drive to speed up the integration of next-generation AI into the real economy. Universities have faced pressure to adapt to rapid changes in the Chinese economy over recent years, as graduate numbers have soared to record levels but many have found their degrees offer little help when it comes to finding work. The University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, for example, halted admissions for its product design program this year, with one recent graduate saying the decision was partly based on the poor employment prospects. “The rapid development of AI has hit product design hard. Many core tasks, such as modeling and rendering, can now be handled by AI,” said the graduate.
The Communication University of China (CUC) has restructured courses including cinematography, following the shift from film to digital. “With the rise of live streaming and short videos, the requirements for a cameraman are completely different from traditional television news shooting,” a graduate said. Many of the programs cut by universities were only established a few years ago, during an earlier phase of China’s push to overhaul university majors, the South China Morning Post reports.
