China Has Cancelled 12,000 University Degrees: When the State Decides What's Worth Knowing

Between 2021 and 2025, the People's Republic of China did something that, stated plainly, sounds almost implausible: it cancelled or suspended more than 12,000 university degree programs at public institutions across the country. This was not a quiet restructuring, nor a series of cuts driven by budget shortfalls. It was a deliberate, declared, and openly defended decision. China's Ministry of Education published annual reports explaining that the eliminated programs were "misaligned with labor market needs" and that the university system had to reorient itself toward national strategic priorities. In their place, with a speed that leaves little room for ambiguity, new courses have been introduced in artificial intelligence, robotics, semiconductors, industrial automation, and data science. The direction is unmistakable. China wants to train a generation of technical specialists for the digital economy it is building. And it is doing so in the most direct way imaginable: by deciding what can be studied, and what cannot.

The figure itself is staggering, but it becomes even more significant when placed in context. According to reports from the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China and analyses published by China Daily and the Global Times between 2022 and 2025, the disciplines most affected have been the humanities, the arts, certain branches of law, and applied social sciences. In other words, precisely the fields that have historically taught people to read reality critically, to question it, and to challenge structures of power. That is not a minor detail.

The question that arises naturally — and that should concern anyone working in education policy — is this: what happens when a state stops being the guardian of knowledge and becomes its gatekeeper? Because there is an enormous difference between a government that invests in certain sectors and one that decides which forms of knowledge deserve to exist and which must disappear. The former is industrial policy. The latter is something subtler, and considerably more dangerous.

Artificial intelligence, in this scenario, is not only the protagonist of the change: it is also the justification. The official narrative from Beijing — and not only from Beijing, it must be said — is that the world is changing so fast that educational systems can no longer afford the luxury of teaching what is not immediately applicable. That logic is understandable, even partly convincing. But it conceals a trap: if education becomes purely functional to the market, it stops being a right and becomes a service. And services get optimized, cut, and redirected according to the demands of the moment.

What is happening in China is not an isolated phenomenon. It is the most visible and accelerated version of a tendency running through many Western education systems, where degree programs in philosophy, literature, or sociology are progressively sidelined in funding and in public perception. The difference is that elsewhere the process is slow, mediated by democratic debate, press scrutiny, and the resistance of academic communities. In China, it happened in four years, by government decree.

The final reflection, then, does not concern China alone. It concerns anyone looking at this model as an example of efficiency to be admired or replicated. Before artificial intelligence reshapes the labor market — and it will, on this the data from the OECD and the World Economic Forum are unambiguous — it is already transforming something deeper: the boundaries of what we are permitted to learn. And that, unlike an algorithm, cannot be fixed with a software update.

Sources: Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China, annual reports 2022–2025; China Daily; Global Times; OECD, "Education at a Glance 2025"; World Economic Forum, "Future of Jobs Report 2025".