China’s ‘unprecedented’ plan to re-engineer its universities
Across China, the map of higher education is being redrawn. Old majors are disappearing, new ones are fast-tracked in strategic fields, and the pace of change is dizzying. But one pressing question remains: can this transformation truly serve the people it is meant to educate?
(By Caixin journalists Fan Qiaojia, Tang Hanyu, Bai Yueyao and Chen Jia)
Wang Nan, a university instructor, learned in April that her academic department was slated for elimination.
Her province had issued a directive for all its universities to undertake a “great transformation in three years”. The order required each one to cull 40% of their academic programmes, specifically targeting those unrelated to the province’s key industries. At her science and technology-focused university, that meant 15 majors — including international Chinese language education and international trade, which suffered from weaker faculty and poorer job prospects — were cut in a single stroke.
“The impact on teachers and students is enormous,” Wang said. This fall, her department stopped accepting new students. By 2028, after the last of the current students graduate, it will officially cease to exist. Many students, upon hearing the news, rushed to transfer to other fields. Some professors were left with no classes to teach and were reassigned to related departments, forcing them to learn entirely new subjects. Others were shunted into administrative roles.
Unsure of her own future, Wang has chosen to pursue further studies to build new credentials.
Last year alone, universities added 1,673 programmes aligned with the national strategic needs and eliminated 1,670 others.
Her story is a small part of a vast, state-directed overhaul of China’s higher education system, a reform campaign that is entering its most challenging phase. In just the past two years, universities nationwide have made changes to roughly 20% of their academic programmes. According to the latest data from the Ministry of Education, 1,428 programme offerings were eliminated in 2024 alone — a number that has grown by 25 times over the past decade.
While old majors are being shuttered en masse, new ones are rapidly being launched, concentrated in foundational sciences, emerging interdisciplinary fields and areas of urgent national strategic demand. To accelerate the process, the Ministry of Education has established a fast-track approval mechanism for programmes in high-priority areas, creating a “green channel” that bypasses the usual annual application deadlines.
“It is a structural adjustment of unprecedented scale and intensity,” Wu Yan, vice minister of education, said at a press conference in September.
Since the 18th Party Congress in 2012, Wu explained, China has added 21,000 new undergraduate programmes while cutting or suspending 12,000 that were deemed out of sync with China economic and social development plans. Last year alone, universities added 1,673 programmes aligned with the national strategic needs and eliminated 1,670 others. “The scale of this adjustment is truly without precedent,” he said.
An analysis of undergraduate programme changes from 2014 to 2024 by Wu Zhengyang and his colleagues at Huazhong University of Science and Technology’s Institute of Education Sciences concluded that “China has ushered in the largest-scale adjustment of academic programme structures in its history”. Their research found that nearly 28,000 programmes were adjusted over the decade, with nearly 90% of the cancellations occurring between 2019 and 2024.
The historic campaign raises critical questions: How are new programmes built from scratch to meet Beijing’s demands? What happens to the students and faculty left behind when departments get shuttered? And can this top-down overhaul avoid creating fruitless internal competition and truly serve the needs of students and the nation?
Three eras of reform
The current campaign is the third major realignment of Chinese higher education since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. Each has been closely tied to the country’s prevailing economic and political agenda.
The first, in the 1950s, followed the Soviet model to serve a planned economy, explained Li Liguo, a tenured professor at Tsinghua University’s Graduate School of Education. Universities were reorganised to bolster engineering programmes, which grew to constitute 30% to 40% of all majors, while programmes in law, finance and other humanities were sharply curtailed. “This adjustment laid the foundation for China’s higher education for decades to come, with engineering long holding the largest share,” Li said, noting that this created the country’s future “engineer dividend”.
The goal, an official from the ministry’s Department of Higher Education explained, was to implement the spirit of the 20th Party Congress and “forge our own path of talent cultivation”.
The second transformation came in the late 1990s amid market reforms and a massive expansion of college enrolment. The gross enrolment rate in higher education surged from under 10% to over 60% in two decades. “During this process, development largely followed a model where existing programmes determined future growth,” Li said. “There wasn’t much time to think about optimisation.”
The third and current wave of reform began after 2012, as a gap widened between the skills taught in universities and the needs of a modernising economy. The effort gained significant momentum with a 2023 policy document from the Ministry of Education and four other government bodies. The Reform Plan for Optimising the Adjustment of Academic Programme Offerings set a clear target for the first time: to adjust approximately 20% of all university programme placements by 2025.
The goal, an official from the ministry’s Department of Higher Education explained, was to implement the spirit of the 20th Party Congress and “forge our own path of talent cultivation”. With China’s higher education system having reached mass scale — a gross enrolment rate of 59.6% in 2022 — the focus had to shift from quantity to quality.
In August 2025, the ministry announced the target had been met on schedule. It immediately followed up with a new action plan for 2025-2027 to deepen the reforms, establishing new mechanisms like a national platform for matching talent supply with demand.
“The current thinking could be summarised as: serve the national strategy, face future needs, strengthen interdisciplinary integration and establish a dynamic mechanism,” said Qin Hongxia, associate dean of Xiamen University’s Graduate School of Education.
How a new major is born
To meet Beijing’s goals, the creation of a new major is a carefully managed process. This year, 29 new undergraduate majors were added to the national catalogue, including low-altitude technology and engineering, and geriatric medicine and health.
Low-altitude technology and engineering saw the most placements, with six universities adding the programme. Its creation was fast-tracked. After a July 2024 Politburo meeting called for the development of the “low-altitude economy”, the Ministry of Education guided universities to develop the major, bypassing the standard year-ahead pre-application process so that students could be enrolled by the fall of 2025.
Renmin University of China established the country’s first College of Disciplinary Inspection and Supervision, a field created to train professionals for the Communist Party’s anti-corruption bodies.
Universities are also acting on their own to get their academic programmes in line with state priorities. Xi’an University of Technology, an engineering-focused institution in Northwest China’s Shaanxi province, has added 11 new majors since 2018, including smart manufacturing, while cutting 11 others with low enrolment and weak job prospects. New programmes must meet four criteria, said Yan Li, the university’s vice president. They must align with national strategy and provincial industrial chains, fit the university’s development plan, meet strong talent demand and have sufficient resources.
For many new programmes, especially in entirely new fields, the biggest challenges are a lack of faculty and teaching materials. Renmin University of China established the country’s first College of Disciplinary Inspection and Supervision, a field created to train professionals for the Communist Party’s anti-corruption bodies.
With no established curriculum or body of research, the college had to build everything from the ground up, said its dean, Wang Xu. “We had no model to copy,” he said. The initial teaching staff was composed of professors appointed from related fields like law and political science. The college is now training its own doctoral students and postdocs with the aim of creating a dedicated faculty.
Students in these new, state-sanctioned fields are often bullish about their prospects. “If I can master this, I won’t have any worries about employment,” said Zhang Wen, a freshman in a new dual-degree programme at Beijing Normal University that combines Chinese language and literature with artificial intelligence. “I’ll probably work at a big tech company on large language models.”
Wang is similarly optimistic about his students’ prospects, noting the high demand for anti-corruption and compliance experts in government agencies and state-owned enterprises. “This field is a ‘blue ocean’ — an untapped market,” said Lin Mei, a graduate student in the programme, who was drawn by the prospect of a career that felt meaningful.
... the five most-cut undergraduate majors from 2020 to 2024 were information management, public administration, information and computing science, marketing, and product design.
After the axe
For every new major launched, another is being shut down, often due to the poor job prospects facing its graduates. At a vocational college in South China’s Hunan province, Meng Ying, a preschool education instructor, was told her programme was being cancelled. With China’s birthrate falling, the demand for kindergarten teachers has plummeted.
After the announcement, most of her colleagues were reassigned. Meng was moved to an administrative post. Though she misses teaching, she understands the decision. Graduates struggled to find work, she said, and “the pay was just too low”. Facing dim prospects, some of her students dropped out to work in nail salons or as livestreamers. Some from poorer families went to work in factories in South China’s Guangdong province.
According to statistics compiled by education consulting firm MyCOS, the five most-cut undergraduate majors from 2020 to 2024 were information management, public administration, information and computing science, marketing, and product design.
Zhang Yu was sad to hear his art management major at the Communication University of China was being discontinued. But he also acknowledged that few of his classmates found work in the field. After six internships, he now works as a journalist.
The transition is often difficult for faculty. At a public university in northeastern China, broadcast and television majors were suspended years ago, but have yet to be officially eliminated, leaving faculty in limbo. “Everyone is worried about their salary,” professor Cheng Chun said. To meet their required teaching hours, some professors are now teaching introductory courses in other departments or general education electives. “If there’s really nothing left to teach, you transfer to administration,” she said.
For Yang Cui, a professor at a private university in southwestern China, the influx of reassigned faculty from a cancelled preschool education programme has created tensions. Her Marxism department took in four new teachers, which meant her own teaching load was reduced. Some colleagues with mortgages and children to support resented the lost hours, she said, while others who were already overworked “welcomed the help with open arms”.
The pace of change is what feels different, Yang said. “In the past, a major might be replaced over a long period, giving teachers time to adjust. Now, it has accelerated, and that makes it exceptionally noticeable in a person’s lifetime.”
Creating genuine innovation
The ultimate test of the reforms is whether they can create genuine innovation or will simply result in ― as a common Chinese saying goes ― “new wine in old bottles”.
“Universities should cultivate students with character and allow for majors with character,” he said. “Some unpopular subjects are, in fact, the very places where a university’s soul is nurtured.” — Wang Xu, Dean, Renmin University
Some experts warn that China’s highly centralised system, where academic programme catalogues are tied to resource allocation, degree authorisations and enrolment quotas, makes genuine change difficult. “These tightly bundled systems have led to a high degree of homogenisation in talent cultivation,” said Wang Dingming, president of Lanzhou University of Arts and Science. He argues that this deep-seated “path dependency” is precisely why the current adjustment is so necessary.
While the market plays a larger role than in the past, “the administrative colour of planning, application, and approval remains prominent,” said Qin from Xiamen University.
Tian Xianpeng, an associate professor of education at Jiangnan University, said that relying too heavily on short-term metrics like employment rates is a mistake. “The move to cancel humanities programmes, for instance, is a concentrated expression of short-term utilitarianism,” he said.
To break down rigid disciplinary silos, many universities are experimenting with broad-category enrolment, where students enter a general field and choose a specific major later. “The key is to give the initiative to the students,” Tsinghua University’s Li said.
But true interdisciplinary fusion faces hurdles, including rules governing faculty appointments and how research is evaluated. “China’s academic disciplines are among the most finely divided in the world,” Li said.
Wang, the dean at Renmin University, cautions that the reform’s success will depend on avoiding a one-size-fits-all approach. He worries that in the rush to meet state directives, universities will all pursue the same hot majors, leading to a kind of toxic competition among institutions of higher education. “Universities should cultivate students with character and allow for majors with character,” he said. “Some unpopular subjects are, in fact, the very places where a university’s soul is nurtured.”
Chen Jia is an intern at Caixin Media.
This article was first published by Caixin Global as “In Depth: China’s ‘Unprecedented’ Plan to Reengineer Its Universities”. Caixin Global is one of the most respected sources for macroeconomic, financial and business news and information about China.
