China's universities cut 12,000 'obsolete' degrees amid race to embrace AI era

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 favour of new, tech-focused programmes.

The sweeping campaign comes as China races to become a global leader in a slew of hi-tech "future industries" and solve a severe graduate jobs 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 programmes while introducing 10,200 new ones, meaning that more than 30% of the nation's university programmes underwent adjustments, according to Ministry of Education data cited by Xinhua.

The cuts have been heavily concentrated in arts, humanities, foreign languages and management - fields that are increasingly deemed outdated or oversaturated in China, where more than 16% of young people are unemployed and the job market is being rapidly transformed by artificial intelligence.

Many of the new programmes, meanwhile, 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 programme this year, with one recent graduate saying the decision was partly based on the poor employment prospects of students on the programme.

"The rapid development of AI has hit product design hard," said the graduate, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the topic. "Many core tasks, such as modelling and rendering, can now be handled by AI."

The Communication University of China (CUC) - a prestigious media-focused school in Beijing - has made headlines by restructuring a string of programmes including cinematography, which has been merged with the film and televsision cinematography and production programme.

University alumni said the consolidation was a natural response to technological and market changes. Song Song, a videographer who finished CUC's cinematography programme in 2012, said his undergraduate years had coincided with 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," Song said. "Changes in education are absolutely necessary."

However, switching one programme for another is only going to be a short-term fix, and deeper changes to higher education may be needed to adapt to an era of accelerating technological change, warned Chu Zhaohui, a senior researcher at the National Institute of Education Sciences.

Many of the programmes cut by universities were only established a few years ago, during an earlier phase of China's push to overhaul university majors, Chu pointed out. As a result, they had little time to develop and improve.

Rather than continually swapping out one major for another, Chu suggested that universities adopt a more flexible system that gives students greater freedom to select their own courses.

"This would allow them to select courses based on their personal interests, unique strengths, and their demand for different career paths, ultimately building their own distinctive intellectual profile," Chu said.

As the job market becomes increasingly volatile, many in China are coming to view undergraduate degrees as a starting point rather than a final destination.

Vincent Zhao, a 48-year-old who runs a media production company in Beijing, encouraged his daughter to choose a programme focusing on statistics and data governance when she entered university last year.

"We focused on choosing a broad direction that aligns with what she likes and excels at, leaving room for either future postgraduate studies or employment," Zhao said.

"The old path - where you study one specific major, find a perfectly matched job, and stay in it stably for a lifetime - simply does not exist any more."