China to Eliminate 12,000 University Majors in Favor of AI Programs

China is closing 12,000 university majors and replacing them with AI programs. The scale of the reform is unprecedented: it covers a third of all undergraduate programs in the country.

What is being closed and why

The cuts hit humanities and creative majors first: translation studies, art history, management, public administration, library science, a number of journalism programs and cultural studies. These are the disciplines with the worst graduate employment figures.

China's Ministry of Education officially justifies the decision with two factors. The first is a sharp rise in youth unemployment: in 2025, the rate for the 16–24 age group exceeded 20%, a historic high. The second is technological change: tasks once handled by translators, assistants and records-management specialists are increasingly being done by AI tools. Demand for these professions is falling faster than universities can respond.

In effect, the state is publicly admitting the obvious: the labor market cannot absorb hundreds of thousands of humanities graduates every year. Data engineers, AI developers and automation specialists, by contrast, are in desperately short supply. The imbalance built up over years, and the authorities have now decided to fix it by decree and on a compressed timeline.

What will open in their place

New technology-oriented programs are replacing the closed majors. These are the first to open:

• Machine learning and neural network architectures
• Robotics and autonomous systems
• Data analysis and data engineering
• AI in medicine, biotechnology and agriculture
• Industrial automation and smart manufacturing
• Cybersecurity and AI ethics

The country's leading universities, Tsinghua University and Peking University, have already announced joint programs with Huawei, ByteDance and Baidu. Students will combine academic training with real projects inside technology companies. A corporate partnership is becoming a mandatory condition for accrediting a new program; without one, the ministry will not approve it.

There is a particular emphasis on applied skills: graduates are expected to work with specific tools, not just know the theory. The state wants to cut the time a young specialist needs to adapt to the workplace from two years to six months.

Scale and timeline

The 12,000 closed programs amount to about 30% of all undergraduate majors in the country, affecting hundreds of thousands of applicants every year. The mechanism is centralized: the Ministry of Education publishes a mandatory list of majors to be eliminated each year, and the pace is accelerating annually.

The implementation period is 2026–2028. Students in cohorts already enrolled will be able to finish their studies, but new admissions to the closing majors have been halted immediately.

Analysts forecast that by 2030 the share of AI-related majors at Chinese universities will grow from the current 8% to 35%. That means one in three students at a technical university will be connected to AI technologies in one way or another, compared with one in twelve today.

What this means

China is forcing its education system to pivot toward technology: fast, by decree, from the top down. For the global market, this means a sharp increase in the supply of AI specialists over the next five to seven years, which will inevitably affect the competitiveness of Chinese tech companies.

It is a large-scale experiment in what happens to the labor market and the economy when a state retrains a third of the country's university programs in three years. Other countries, including Russia, will be watching closely. The answer will become visible as early as 2030.