Between 2021 and 2025, China's Ministry of Education revoked or suspended 12,200 undergraduate degree programmes — more than 30% of the country's total offerings — replacing them with degrees in semiconductor design, robotics engineering, and a newly minted discipline called embodied intelligence.
The cuts have been heavily concentrated in arts, humanities, foreign languages and management, fields deemed outdated or oversaturated in the Chinese economy. Nine universities have already launched formal programmes in subjects that barely existed five years ago.
The message from Beijing is unambiguously clear: a degree that does not serve the state's economic priorities is a degree that should not exist.
The instinct is understandable. China's youth unemployment rate exceeds 16%, and the pressure to produce job-ready graduates in a rapidly automating economy is real. The United Kingdom followed a softer version of the same reasoning. There were no sweeping government directives. Instead, the shift unfolded through market signals, as students and families recalculated where a degree led. The proportion of students studying humanities fell from 28% in 1962 to 9% by 2010, and several universities have since cancelled courses in classics, philosophy and literature because of low recruitment.
China's reforms may appear pragmatic, but they also force universities everywhere to confront a question that many higher education institutions are yet to fully grapple with. Is higher education meant to satisfy immediate labour-market demand, or cultivate capacities that outlast economic cycles?
Prof M A Venkataramanan, Pro Vice-Chancellor at FLAME University, argues that universities risk becoming overly reactive if economic demand becomes the sole measure of academic value. "Universities should continuously evaluate the relevance of their programmes, but relevance must be defined more broadly than immediate economic returns," he says. “Higher education has a dual responsibility: preparing students for evolving labour markets while also developing critical thinking, ethical reasoning, creativity, and civic awareness. Rather than eliminating disciplines, institutions should focus on modernising curricula, integrating emerging technologies, and strengthening interdisciplinary learning.”
The emerging labour-market and hiring trends also diverge from policymakers' assumptions. Data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that recent computer science graduates are entering the workforce at 6.1% unemployment, comparable to fine arts graduates, while computer engineering graduates face rates approaching double those of art history majors. A Pearson survey found that 67% of HR professionals now value liberal arts degrees more than they used to, and 69% said broad, interdisciplinary backgrounds matter more for early-career talent than deep specialisation. In India, 65% of HR leaders agreed.
"An AI economy will reward individuals who can connect ideas across disciplines, navigate ambiguity, and solve problems that do not have predefined answers," says Prof Venkataramanan. "As AI becomes more capable of automating specialised tasks, organisations will place greater value on professionals who can integrate technical knowledge with human insight, ethical judgement, and a broad understanding of society."
At Anthropic, a philosopher with a PhD from New York University leads the team responsible for how its AI model thinks and behaves — discipline once viewed as peripheral are finding renewed relevance at the frontier of technology. BlackRock's chief operating officer told Fortune his firm had developed "more and more conviction" that it needed people who studied history and English. Disciplines long dismissed as economically peripheral are finding an unexpected audience in the very companies building artificial intelligence.
China's results will be visible within a decade. Graduates down the line will either find the work waiting, or discover that adaptability was the thing stripped out along with the liberal arts departments. India's choice is less dramatic for now. The engineering and medical degrees remains the mainstream ambition. But India's universities may soon find themselves confronting the same dilemma. Should curricula mirror the labour market, or prepare students for a future that has yet to reveal itself?