China is rethinking degrees for industry. Should India do the same for its MSMEs?

Between 2021 and 2025, Chinese universities revoked or suspended 12,200 undergraduate programme offerings and introduced around 10,200 new ones.

The cuts fell largely across the arts, humanities, foreign languages and management, while many of the additions aligned with AI, robotics and China's industrial priorities. These included carbon neutrality engineering, marine science and technology, AI education, intelligent audiovisual engineering, and digital drama. Not every new programme was engineering or AI, but technology and national strategy clearly shaped those decisions.

China has also been very clear about why it is doing this. It wants universities to align more closely with national strategic priorities, industrial demand, regional development, and anticipated employment needs. The move matters because China expects around 12.7 million university graduates in 2026, while youth unemployment remains high and graduate employment has become a serious problem.


From an India-based viewpoint, there is something admirable about a university system willing to rethink its academic portfolio based on what the country believes it needs.

Things are more problematic in India. We have no shortage of AI, data science, FinTech, robotics, and other very cool-sounding, buzzword degrees or programmes. Yet India's labour market is sending a unique signal. MSMEs, which contribute around 30% of the country's GDP and account for one of its largest sources of employment, continue to struggle to find graduates with practical and transferable skills. At the same time, we do not consistently review low-quality programmes or outdated curricula. Nor do we question institutions offering highly technical programmes without the expertise to deliver them well. We launch new programmes far more easily than we close, merge or redesign old ones. The issue, then, is not simply producing more AI graduates. It is producing graduates whose skills and capabilities match the economy we actually have.

Let's look at some of what was actually cut. At the Communication University of China, five arts specialisations were scrapped, including photography, comics, and new media art. The University of Shanghai for Science and Technology stopped admissions to its product design programme, with the decision explicitly calling out AI taking over modelling and rendering tasks. Around 109 universities discontinued 28 foreign-language-related programme types.

In effect, the system decided these programmes were no longer justified in continuing in their current form.

Employability is a legitimate educational outcome. Students invest time and money in higher education, expecting it to improve their employment prospects. Universities cannot continue offering programmes that have become irrelevant and then hide behind the broader promise of "education."

But this is where things get uncomfortable. Are we then saying that universities should only teach what today's economy needs? And who decides that? Who defines an educational outcome, and over what time horizon are we measuring it?

A discipline may remain valuable even when a programme has become obsolete. Poor teaching, outdated curricula, or weak connections to the world of work do not make the discipline itself unimportant. There are plenty of AIs and data science programmes that sound highly relevant but fail to equip students with skills that employers actually value.

Equally, disciplines like history, sociology, and language studies may not always map neatly to a first job, but that does not make them less valuable. They help us understand society, institutions, and human behaviour. The challenge is not whether these disciplines should exist, but whether the programmes built around them are evolving with the world beyond the classroom.

What India should learn from China is the need for periodic reviews, clear closure mechanisms, demand forecasting, and curricula that are agile enough to change.

What India should resist is the temptation to let first-job outcomes become the sole measure of educational value.

Universities are not only responsible for supplying talent to the economy. They are also responsible for building the society within which the economy exists. The real question is not merely what jobs universities should fill, but what kind of economy, workforce, and society they exist to build.

George Santayana famously wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” But if we decide that history is unimportant because its value cannot be measured through something as narrow as a first job, who will remember the past well enough for the rest of us? These disciplines are not simply routes to employment. They help us understand who we are, where we came from, and how societies evolve. That value cannot always be measured through the outcome of a first job.

The author is an ed-strategist, consultant, coach, and mentor–supporting educators, teams and education organisations.