The cuts have mainly focused (as always in these cases) on the arts and humanities, but there have also been quite a few in foreign languages and business management.
Between 2021 and 2025, Chinese universities have eliminated or suspended 12,200 undergraduate degree programs and launched 10,200 new ones. More than 30 percent of all university programs in the country have undergone changes, with cuts primarily focused on the arts, humanities, foreign languages, and business management. The new courses, on the other hand, are almost all dedicated to artificial intelligence, robotics, and the technological skills that Beijing identifies as priorities. Nine universities have added courses in “integrated intelligence,” which are dedicated to how to integrate next-generation AIs into the real economy. This is a rewriting of the educational offerings of an entire country, implemented in just four years, with the explicit goal of eliminating degrees considered no longer viable in the job market.
The reform is not only driven by enthusiasm for AI but also by a severe and prolonged employment crisis. As reported by the South China Morning Post, more than 16 percent of young Chinese are unemployed. This summer, 12.7 million students will graduate, a 4 percent increase compared to last year. The old model (degree, job following the degree, appropriate and stable career) no longer works, and everyone in China, including students, has understood this. A recent industrial design graduate told the South China Morning Post that his course was suspended also because AI has severely impacted the modeling and rendering sector, now that both of these jobs can be largely, if not completely, performed by AI. Beijing is pairing the cuts with a retraining campaign, with the Ministry of Human Resources committing to provide one million young people with the necessary skills in AI and the new automotive industry (i.e., electric cars), precisely the sectors on which China is focusing to reform its economy. Some cities have launched programs that combine a year of study with a year of internship, for example. However, doubts and protests from students are not lacking: many online are questioning the sense of going to university only to end up working in a factory building cars.
Not everyone is convinced that changing degree programs solves the underlying problem. Chu Zhaohui, a senior researcher at the National Institute of Education Sciences in Beijing, pointed out that many of the programs just eliminated were created a few years ago, thanks to a previous reform. Instead of continuing to replace one program with another, Zhaohui argues that universities should give students more freedom to build a cross-disciplinary educational profile, rather than forcing them to focus entirely on a specialization that may no longer be viable at the time of entering the job market.
This is demonstrated by research from World Weather Attribution, which analyzed climate data from 854 cities in 30 European countries.
