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been heavily concentrated in arts, humanities, foreign languages and management–fields that are increasingly deemed outdated or oversaturated in China.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.