EXPLAINER: Why is China removing 12,200 degrees from its education system?

A university degree in China now has to earn its place. If it does not serve the country's technology ambitions, it is being cut.

Between 2021 and 2025, China's higher education institutions revoked or suspended 12,200 undergraduate degree programmes while introducing 10,200 new ones — meaning more than 30 per cent of the nation's university programmes underwent adjustments, according to Ministry of Education data cited by Xinhua. It is one of the most sweeping overhauls of higher education seen anywhere in the world in recent memory.

The casualties are concentrated in a familiar set of disciplines. The restructuring has fallen hardest on arts, humanities, foreign language, and management programs — fields that policymakers and universities view as saturated or misaligned with labour market demand. The replacements tell you everything about where China wants to go: AI, robotics, semiconductors, chip design, and a newer field called embodied intelligence — the integration of next-generation AI into physical systems and the real economy. Nine universities have already added new majors in embodied intelligence alone.

The words used matter

The language coming from university administrators has been notably blunt. The Communication University of China, considered one of the country's top institutions for media and arts, cancelled five majors — photography, comics, visual communication design, new media art, and fashion design — while introducing three new programmes built around intelligent imaging, audiovisual engineering, and creative design.

The university's head was equally direct about why. Translation, he said, "has already been largely replaced by AI," and "setting up a four-year major for translation in a specific language is a huge waste of national resources." Arts programmes were scrapped because the future, in his framing, would be an era of human-machine cooperation. Sixth Tone

Jilin University, East China Normal University, and Nanchang University have also announced closures of arts majors including drama and film literature, broadcasting, directing, and animation.

Not everyone has accepted the framing quietly. Some observers criticised the moves as abrupt, while others argued that AI would eventually eliminate most academic disciplines entirely. A graduate from one of the affected programmes put it more precisely: "The problems brought by new technologies should be addressed within the field, rather than by simply cutting the discipline altogether."

The unemployment pressure underneath it all

The overhaul does not exist in a vacuum. Two compounding pressures are driving it: a severe graduate unemployment crisis and the rapid spread of artificial intelligence across the labour market. Youth unemployment has exceeded 16 per cent, and millions of recent graduates have found their credentials do little to help them land work in an economy shifting quickly beneath them.

The mismatch between what universities were producing and what the economy actually needed had been building for years. Beijing has now decided to resolve it from the top down — not by waiting for market signals to filter through the education system over a generation, but by directing universities to change now.

A global moment, accelerated

China is not alone in rethinking its curricula for an AI-driven economy. India, the United Arab Emirates, Kazakhstan, and Spain have all updated national curricula to incorporate AI-related courses and literacy. But the scale and speed of what China is doing — restructuring nearly a third of all university programmes in four years — has no real parallel elsewhere.

The message from the Ministry of Education is clear: degrees that do not serve the country's development priorities are on the chopping block.

What that means for the students who wanted to study literature, or translation, or the arts — and for the kind of society a country produces when it systematically deprioritises the humanities — is a question Beijing has not yet publicly answered.