Marketing. Japanese. Product design. Photography. Each was a normal undergraduate degree in China five years ago. Between 2021 and 2025, universities across the country revoked or suspended 12,200 undergraduate programmes and opened 10,200 new ones, an overhaul touching more than 30 per cent of national degree offerings, according to Ministry of Education figures reported by the state news agency Xinhua. The heaviest cuts landed on arts, humanities, foreign languages and management. The replacements cluster in a narrow band: artificial intelligence, robotics, semiconductor engineering and advanced manufacturing.

Graduate employment outcomes decide which programmes survive. Under a national scheme to reform undergraduate disciplines, provincial authorities compile two lists: majors urgently needed by local industry, and majors whose graduates struggle to find work. Twenty-three provincial-level areas identified 520 urgently needed majors and 223 with relatively low employment rates, and universities treat those lists as the reference point for what to close. Revoking a degree removes the programme from the national catalogue. Suspension halts new admissions while enrolled students finish their courses. The ministry also issues warnings over programmes with no intake for five years or more, so dormant degrees do not sit on the books. Either way, a programme keeps its place by where its graduates end up.

Chinese universities need government approval for the degrees they offer, so the catalogue moves as one system rather than campus by campus, and the pace of removal has accelerated. In the 2023 round of national approvals, universities applied to cancel 1,670 programmes, the highest total in recent years, while 1,719 programmes were added or adjusted. Foreign languages show the pattern most clearly. A survey of 70 universities published in May found eight Japanese programmes, five German and five in translation studies dropped from coming intakes. Marketing lost the most ground in 2025, with 16 programmes closed across the same group of institutions.

Behind the reshuffle sits a job market young graduates struggle to enter. The country produces more than 12 million university graduates a year, and many end up in work unrelated to their subject. Urban unemployment among 16 to 24 year olds outside full-time education reached 16.9 per cent in March, up from 16.1 per cent a month earlier.

Some closures follow the technology directly. The University of Shanghai for Science and Technology suspended admissions to product design this year, and a recent graduate of the programme said AI had hit the field hard, because core tasks such as modelling and rendering are now handled by software. Others rebuild rather than close. The Communication University of China, a leading media school in Beijing, folded its cinematography major into a broader film and television production programme, dropped five degrees including photography, comics and visual communication design, and opened AI-based courses such as intelligent imaging art.

What replaces the old degrees reads like an industrial plan. In April the education ministry backed nine universities to open majors in embodied intelligence, the Chinese term for AI built into physical machines such as humanoid robots, with the stated aim of binding the newest AI to the real economy. Of 38 new majors approved for the coming academic year, most sit in technology or digital fields. The national catalogue now carries entries for future robotics, brain-machine science and technology, agricultural robotics and rare-earth science.

The sequence is deliberate. Beijing named the industries first, then rebuilt the degrees to feed them, rather than waiting for graduates to sort themselves into whatever work appeared. A student entering university this autumn chooses from a menu shaped by where the state expects demand a decade from now. A degree takes years to produce a graduate, so the catalogue drawn up today sets the shape of the workforce arriving at the end of the decade.

The bet has a clean structure and an unproven result. Robotics, chips and machine learning have absorbed money and policy attention, though the students now enrolling in those programmes reach the labour market years from now. Whether the new degrees deliver the jobs they were built for will show up in the same employment data used to close the old ones.

Sources

South China Morning Post, China’s universities cut 12,000 ‘obsolete’ degrees amid race to embrace AI era — scmp.com
Ministry of Education, MOE Releases Latest Undergraduate Program Accreditation and Approval Results — moe.gov.cn
Rest of World, Chinese universities are cutting language majors to make way for AI — restofworld.org
Forbes, China Cuts 12,200 University Programs, Replaces Many With AI Degrees — forbes.com
VnExpress International, China’s universities cut 12,000 ‘obsolete’ majors in AI overhaul — e.vnexpress.net
The State Council, China adds new majors to higher education catalog for national development needs — gov.cn