Between 2021 and 2025, China's higher education institutions revoked or suspended 12,200 bachelor's degree programs while introducing 10,200 new ones, meaning that over 30% of the country's university programs underwent adjustments, according to Ministry of Education data cited by Xinhua.
The campaign comes as China competes to become a global leader in a series of high-tech "future industries" and seeks to resolve a severe employment crisis among recent graduates, which has left millions of young people struggling to find work. According to data from the National Bureau of Statistics published in April of this year, the unemployment rate among young Chinese aged 16 to 24, excluding students, rose from 16.1% in February to 16.9% in March. Over 12 million new graduates are expected to enter the Chinese labor market in 2026, adding more pressure on policymakers to align education with the needs of the job market.
The cuts have fallen most heavily on arts, humanities, foreign languages, and management programs. Across the country, universities are cutting or suspending majors that once attracted large numbers of students and replacing them with programs related to artificial intelligence, robotics, embedded intelligence, chip design, and other strategic technologies. Nine Chinese universities have already added new majors in embedded intelligence, aligning with the country's drive to integrate new-generation AI into the real economy.
The case of a specific university illustrates the speed of change. Shanghai University of Science and Technology halted admissions to its product design program after faculty concluded that advances in AI were transforming many of the traditional tasks in the field. An anonymous graduate of the university described the change in practical terms: "The rapid development of AI hit product design hard."
The phenomenon is not limited to cutting and replacing programs. Nearly 60% of Chinese students and professors already use AI tools multiple times a day, and universities like Zhejiang have made AI use mandatory, while top-tier institutions like Tsinghua have created entire interdisciplinary colleges dedicated to artificial intelligence. In China, mastery of AI is no longer optional.
Not all specialists believe the solution is simply to swap one program for another. Chu Zhaohui, a senior researcher at the National Institute of Educational Sciences, warned that substituting one program for another will only be a short-term solution, and that deeper changes in higher education are needed to adapt to an era of accelerated technological change. Many of the programs cut by universities had been established only a few years earlier, during a previous phase of the same restructuring, and thus had little time to develop and improve. Instead of constantly swapping one major for another, Chu suggested that universities adopt a more flexible system that gives students greater freedom to choose their own courses.
China's educational shift reflects a trend already observed in other parts of the world: India, the United Arab Emirates, Kazakhstan, and Spain have also updated their national curricula to incorporate AI courses and literacy. The United States is no exception: dozens of American universities have launched specific AI programs in the last two years, and MIT reports that its "AI and Decision Making" major is already the second largest on campus.
For the next+ team, the Chinese case is the most aggressive and large-scale educational policy experiment currently underway regarding how to restructure university training in the face of AI disruption, and it offers lessons that go beyond geography. Three facts deserve particular attention from talent strategy designers. First, speed: over 30% of a country's university programs changed in just five years, a pace of institutional transformation that no Western economy has yet attempted to replicate. Second, the Chinese system's own warning: reactively substituting majors without giving them time to mature risks repeating the same error sought to be corrected, training professionals for a market demand that, by the time they graduate, has already changed again. Third, and most relevant for business leadership outside China, the speed of AI adoption among students and faculty, not just curriculum redesign, is what is really moving the needle. For companies competing for technical talent globally, the question is not whether to replicate the Chinese model of massive curricular cuts, but how quickly their own internal development programs and alliances with educational institutions are moving in the face of a transformation that in China already has five years of measurable progress.