China’s youth jobless rate climbed to 17.9% in July, reports the South China Morning Post. This comes as a record wave of university graduates enters an already crowded labour market, prompting Beijing to step up employment support.

The jobless rate for those aged 16 to 24, excluding students, rose from 14.9% in June–the last of three straight months of contraction–according to data released by the National Bureau of Statistics on Wednesday.

The uptick in youth unemployment coincides with another record-breaking graduation season, with an estimated 12.7 million university graduates entering the job market this summer, up about 4% from last year.

China’s universities are undertaking a massive reshuffling of their academic offerings, reports the South China Morning Post. The country is culling thousands of so-called obsolete degrees in favor of new, tech-focused programmes.

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.

The cuts have been heavily concentrated in arts, humanities, foreign languages and management–fields that are increasingly deemed outdated or oversaturated in China. Many of the new programmes 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.

China has reported a second consecutive decline in the number of students sitting the country’s national university entrance exams, reports the South China Morning Post. This comes as a graduate jobs crunch leads many teenagers to decide against pursuing an academic degree.

A total of 12.9 million students have registered for this year’s National Higher Education Entrance Examination–known as the gaokao in China–down 450,000 from a year ago, according to data from the Ministry of Education. In 2025, the number of sign-ups fell by 70,000 compared with the previous year.

For decades, the gaokao has been known for being brutally competitive, with families often viewing the test as having the potential to make or break a young person’s future. But attitudes are beginning to change as millions of university graduates struggle to secure jobs amid China’s economic slowdown, according to market observers.

The number of Chinese students heading overseas for education has dropped to the lowest level in a decade, reports Caixin. The drop signals a structural shift in a lucrative market that Western universities have long relied upon.

According to data released by China’s Ministry of Education, 570,600 Chinese students went abroad in 2025. The figure represents a decline of nearly 20% from the historical peak of 703,500 in 2019, bringing the scale of outbound students back to around 2016 levels. For Western universities that have banked on a steady stream of full-tuition-paying Chinese students, the shift points to a new era of adjustment following years of explosive growth.

Official data also showed a growing wave of returnees. In 2025, 535,600 students returned to China after completing their studies, an increase of 40,600 from 2024 and 120,000 from 2023. Between 1978 and 2025, a total of 9.46 million Chinese studied abroad; of the 8.01 million who completed their education, 6.98 million—or more than 87%—chose to return home to build their careers. The recent release marks the first time since 2020 that the government has resumed publishing official data on outbound students.

China’s largest private education company in terms of market value has begun offering leisure courses such as dance and photography for older adults in Beijing, reports the South China Morning Post. This comes as it pivots towards the country’s fast-growing silver economy.

Since a ban on for-profit tutoring in core academic subjects in 2021, New Oriental has diversified into new areas, including live streaming e-commerce. Amid falling birth rates and a prolonged decline in the number of Chinese students studying in the United States, its latest foray targets older consumers.

“The silver economy has strong growth potential,” said Fu Yifu, a special researcher at Su Merchants Bank in Nanjing, eastern Jiangsu province. As the sector expands, Fu said, demand among seniors was rising for hobbies, social interaction and emotional well-being.