Between 2021 and 2025, China’s Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) slashed 12,200 undergraduate degree programmes and introduced 10,200 new ones. Together, the changes touched more than 30% of all degree offerings in the country, impacting the academic futures of an estimated 2.4 million students. Perhaps it is the largest and fastest curriculum overhaul, any large education system has attempted in modern times.
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The logic behind the purge is blunt, pragmatic, and entirely devoid of academic sentimentality: if a degree doesn’t reliably lead to a high-value job in the age of Artificial Intelligence (AI), it is treated as dead weight.
As India continues to graduate millions of traditional arts, science, commerce, and engineering students into an increasingly automated market, China’s radical experiment sends a warning signal: Are we educating our youth for the future? Or are we preparing them for a job market that has already ceased to exist? If it is the latter, how do we re-engineer the system to make our youth employable and productive?
Why China plugged the plug
The trigger for China was twofold: an acute graduate jobs crisis, and an AI revolution that arrived much faster than university syndicates could plan for. China’s youth unemployment rate (excluding students aged 16–24) climbed to 16.9% by March 2026. With roughly 12.7 million new graduates entering the job market this year alone, it created an enormous load on an economy, already struggling to match talent to relevant roles. Simultaneously, AI tools began hollowing out the very entry-level cognitive tasks, those degrees were designed to teach.
The course cuts fell the heaviest on arts, humanities, foreign languages, traditional management, and legacy engineering fields China now considers oversaturated or misaligned with its macroeconomic pivot. Conversely, the 10,200 newly introduced programs do not focus on abstract software coding; they map onto physical deep tech, hardware integration, and resource sustainability and target “future industries.”
For instance, the traditional Arts and design program is rolled into AI-embedded courses like intelligent imaging art, intelligent creative design, and AI-assisted communication. The traditional management track is replaced by data governance and AI-business integration majors. A newly coined discipline called embodied intelligence, merging advanced AI models with physical, automated machine bodies. is introduced as a standalone major in nine premier universities.
Other newly added categories include Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI), Agricultural Robotics, Carbon Neutrality Science and Intelligent Audiovisual Engineering. China expects to create over 5 million new AI-related and highly skilled digital economy jobs in the future industries over the next three to four years.
India’s version of the problem: the legacy glut
The All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE) 2020–21, the latest data available from Ministry of Education, reveals that 43.3 million students enrolled across the country, with roughly 10.7 million graduating that year. A closer look at the data exposes a profound structural inertia: three legacy disciplines, Arts, Science, and Commerce, constitute over 62% of all undergraduate enrolments.
The Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree , the oldest degree awarded by the first three “modern” Indian Universities of Mumbai, Madras, and Calcutta, was introduced in India in 1857, primarily to generate a clerical workforce to man the British bureaucracy. Some 168 years later, it continues to rule the roost, holding a dominant 34% share of the graduates produced annually, followed by B.Sc. (15%) and B.Com. (13%). Professional disciplines like Engineering & Technology contribute 12%, while Medical Science and Nursing adds 6%.
The reasons for this legacy glut are purely systemic. For the colleges, Arts and Commerce streams represent the path of least financial investment to get affiliated to the universities: no expensive laboratories, and no high-maintenance equipment. Historically, the State government universities rewarded volume over differentiation, making these courses the easiest to get approved. For parents, particularly from the economically weaker sections in rural and semi-urban pockets, they remain the most affordable option to obtain a degree.
Yet, the return on investment is bleak. Analysis of the AISHE data shows that only about 16% of BA graduates pursue a Master’s degree (MA). As per various reports, the vast majority go for years of private coaching for the lucrative banking, railway, or civil service examinations. A minuscule fraction succeed, while the rest spend their prime 20s trapped in extended joblessness, ultimately settling for low salaried gig work or basic clerical roles.
Sensing this dead end, in the recent years , student demand for certain MA disciplines, particularly for languages, has dropped so sharply that the University Grants Commission (UGC) had to issue a notice advising the government universities to rationalise the departments that were opened without any real demand-side assessment.
The engineer education paradox
While the Arts and Commerce glut represents the inertia of the past, India faces an equally dangerous crisis at the cutting edge of its present Engineering and Technology degrees. Though comprising 12% of the graduate pool, Indian engineering suffers from a massive intake-to-employment distortion.
For the last twenty years, a B.Tech in Computer Science (CS) or Information Technology (IT) was treated by the Indian middle class as a safe and rewarding career in India or abroad. Today, it stands at the epicentre of AI disruption. Tier-2 and Tier-3 engineering colleges continue to mass-produce thousands of generic code-writers using obsolete syllabi. However, the bulk-recruitment model of hiring entry level programmers by Indian IT services giants has collapsed in the last five years, due to the impact of Generative AI. Due to increasing protection by the developed countries, opportunities for higher studies abroad, followed by the lucrative jobs, have also been shrinking. Now, the thousands of B Tech graduates that are graduating stare at an uncertain future, unless they upskill themselves in line with the industry needs.
Course correction, not course cancellation
According to the report “AI Workforce Pulse: The Adaptability Imperative,” published by Cognizant-Pearson in June 2026, 96% of HR managers now expect entry-level hires to manage AI systems rather than perform traditional functional tasks. AI fluency has shifted from a “preferred skill” to a baseline hiring filter across non-technical, administrative, and creative roles alike.
As AI commoditizes hard technical knowledge, the human premium has shifted back toward context, critical reasoning, and ethics. Interestingly, the same report noted that 67% of HR professionals now place a higher premium on liberal arts graduates, explicitly preferring interdisciplinary backgrounds over narrow, hyper-focused technical specializations for entry-level leadership tracks.
In the emerging uncertain job markets, the fix is not a ruthless discontinuation of our existing streams. The mandate for Indian academia is therefore integration, not segregation. AI cannot be treated as an elite, walled-off subject reserved solely for tier-1 engineering campuses; it must be integrated seamlessly with every BA, B.Com, and B.Sc syllabus, not merely in theory but with hands-on skills in the respective courses.
The scaffolding to do this already sits inside the UGC’s National Credit Framework (NCrF), which allows universities to attach stackable micro-credentials and industry-certified skill modules directly alongside a student’s core degree papers.
The new generation Indian private institutions have demonstrated how an interdisciplinary curriculum fusing liberal arts with data science and AI can command very high placement packages in the corporate market. Ashoka University offers liberal arts as the core with cross-disciplinary majors and minors. Shiv Nadar university has blended its Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) courses with liberal arts. Plaksha university offers technology curriculum integrating liberal arts and design, project-based learning, with mandatory entrepreneurship component and is able to attract top tier strategy consulting firms like McKinsey and BCG as its recruiters. Krea university has taken the approach of “Interwoven Learning” with joint majors like Economics & Environmental Studies, Politics & History.
Need for strategic workforce planning
To fix the intake-to-employment mismatch at a systemic level, India must discontinue the practice of retrospective skilling, looking at last year’s placement data for academic planning for next year. Over the years, the developed economies have institutionalized proactive long term strategic manpower planning.
The U.S. Department of Labor maintains the Occupational Information Network (ONET), a dynamic, continuously updated AI database that tracks the changing micro-skills required for over 1,000 distinct job roles.
The United Kingdom’s Unit for Future Skills (UFS) publishes open-source skills demand forecasts, enabling the universities to work with the industry to prepare the mandatory Skills Improvement Plans (SIPs), as a prerequisite for institutional accreditation.
As a part of the SkillsFuture initiative, Singapore maps out 23 distinct sectors of the economy, projecting the exact technological shifts and human-headcount requirements, five to 10 years into the future. Universities do not guess their intake capacities; their state funding is tied directly to aligning their degree offerings with the projected output of these Industry Transformation Maps (ITMs).
The Indian way
India cannot copy any of these models blindly. NITI Ayog should develop a National Employment & Skills Database (NESD), as an open-source, AI-driven public platform, which will be an integrated database of sector wise employment, skills projected and expected to be available over the next five years , to enable policy and planning at national as well as regional level.
On demand side, it could capture inputs from industry bodies as well as job portals, supplemented with employment projections from various government initiatives such as the Production Linked Incentive scheme, national sectoral missions (AI, Green Hydrogen and Semiconductors ) and mega projects, like Gati Shakti. Supply side inputs on enrolments and graduation can come on real time basis from Higher Education Institutions, Academic Bank of Credits (ABC) and the Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO). As the One Nation One Data (ONOD) initiative of Ministry of Education rolls out, it can be integrated with the NESD portal.
The portal can provide inputs on skill demand projections to the HEIs so as to enable them to plan for their programs and enrolments. Industry professionals can also look up to it for life-long-learning to upskill themselves aligning with industry requirements.
Way ahead
The instinct to simply mirror China’s scrap-and-replace exercise, comes with a warning from China’s own researchers: swapping one rigid major for another “doesn’t automatically reorient the job market,” and producing large numbers of graduates in AI-adjacent fields does not guarantee that they will be absorbed in a job market, driven by unpredictable disruptions due to advancing technologies such as quantum computing.
Seamless integration of AI into all programs, with hands-on skills is mandatory to groom graduating students for the future. The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, with multidisciplinary mandate, and the Academic Bank of Credits, already provides a suitable scaffolding for a non-disruptive reform.
Sovereign capital expenditure can lay down freight corridors, commission data centers, and subsidize semiconductor fabrication units. But only a meticulously mapped, dynamically upskilled, and agile human workforce can breathe commercial life into them. A National Employment & Skills Database could be the enabler. It has to be a national initiative with multiple government departments, working together.
Bridging the graduation- employability gap is no longer an educational objective; it is essential for sustainable economic growth with equity.
(Prof. O. R. S. Rao is the Chancellor of the ICFAI University, Sikkim. Views are personal)
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