China scrapped 12,000 college degrees. It’s a warning for India’s education system

China has effectively declared one in three of its university courses unfit for the future job market. Isn’t India facing a similar problem?

By Abhay Jere

Late last month, an important piece of news from China came to light — and most in India missed it entirely. China did something unthinkable. It conducted a massive surgical strike on its own education system. Considering the rapid advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and other emerging technologies, China scrapped over 12,000 undergraduate degree programmes that it deemed obsolete and irrelevant. Effectively, it declared one in three of its university courses unfit for the future job market.

In their place, 10,200 new programmes in AI robotics, semiconductors, quantum applications and advanced manufacturing were introduced. Even newer disciplines like “embodied intelligence” — infusing AI into physical machines — are now receiving a massive institutional push.

These reforms were triggered by numbers China could no longer ignore. Its urban youth unemployment exceeded 16 per cent, even as AI and advanced-manufacturing companies complained they could not find qualified people to hire.

Aren’t we facing a similar problem?

By 2047, India aspires to become a developed nation with a $20-trillion economy. We have a young, aspirational population for whom education remains the primary ladder for social and financial mobility. Building high-quality, globally competitive human capital should, therefore, be our foremost national priority.

We always tell ourselves that we are different from China; we are now bigger, younger, more diverse and governed by democratic structures. All true. But none of that changes the frightening number staring back at us: According to the latest India Skills Report, only 56 per cent of graduates are employable.

The India Graduate Skill Index, covering 2,700 campuses and over a million learners, found that employability in AI and machine-learning roles climbed by 46 per cent, while employability in roles like HR, digital marketing and routine administration is falling sharply. A large number of US universities have also slashed fees by 50 per cent for conventional MBA programmes, considering declining demand in an AI-dominated world.

The market is not confused about what it wants. Our education policies need to catch up.

Standard programmes such as BBA, BA and B.Com are struggling because they prepare students for work that software now performs for free — data entry, translation, report formatting, first-draft analysis, routine queries, etc. A student beginning a three- or four-year degree today may graduate into a job description that will no longer exist. With over four crore students enrolled across 50,000+ colleges, and roughly 55-58 per cent studying Arts, Humanities or Commerce, the scale of potential displacement is really enormous.

India cannot and should not run China’s playbook. Our universities are not job factories. For millions of first-generation learners, education is the single most powerful instrument of upward mobility. But “we can’t copy China” must not become an excuse for inaction.

What India needs is not the death of disciplines — it is their rebirth. Humanities programmes must evolve into Digital Humanities or Cultural Analytics. Linguistics must effectively merge with computational semantics. Engineering syllabi must be rebuilt around “systems thinking” and “energy transition”, not legacy techniques. We will need more data-storytellers, not just data scientists.

Industry 5.0 is no longer a distant reality. Now, humans and intelligent machines will work alongside each other. This has already reshaped factory floors, finance teams and design studios. A BBA student who only reads a balance sheet, or a B.Com student who only files returns, will not survive this shift. They must learn to supervise, question and improve upon machine output. Moreover, skill augmentation must become as integral to higher education as earning a degree itself.

NEP-2020, though visionary, is a pre-AI document. We may now need a focused AI addendum that formally pivots our approach.

Our Union Budget has set aside Rs 500 crore for a ‘Centre of Excellence in AI for Education’ in tandem with the IndiaAI Mission. However, pilots are not systems, and intent is not infrastructure.

If we are serious about Viksit Bharat, then we need to build a framework of “viksit vishwavidyalaya”; not as another pilot project to be announced and quietly shelved, but as a national standard for a future-ready Indian university where every degree holder sits alongside genuine AI and data fluency, and where skill augmentation is treated with the same seriousness as the degree certificate itself.

China rewrote a third of its university system because it ran out of patience. India still has a choice. The only question is whether we make it — before the decision is made for us.

The writer is MD & CEO, Dexit Global and former vice-chairman of All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE)