A recruiter (C) introduces job requirements at a recruitment fair in Changsha, central China's Hunan Province, Feb. 11, 2025. (Photo/Xinhua)

Chongqing - As this year's Gaokao, China's college entrance examination, approaches, 29 new majors have been added—the largest update in three years—to better align with the country's evolving job market demands.

These academic programs pertain to several emerging and high-demand industries, such as Artificial Intelligence Education, Intelligent Molecular Engineering, Low-Altitude Technology and Engineering, Carbon Neutrality Science and Engineering, Geriatric Medicine and Health, Intelligent Imaging Arts, and Virtual Space Arts.

Among the 29 newly introduced disciplines, 11 fall under the Engineering and Natural Sciences categories, eight belong to the Arts, five to Management, three to Education, and one to Literature. This trend indicates a concentration of new disciplines in emerging technological fields, with relatively few additions in traditional liberal arts.

"We are strengthening the mutual reinforcement between academic programs and employment to further align higher education with economic and social development," said a Department of Higher Education representative at the Ministry of Education.

China’s job market is under pressure, with a record 12.22 million college graduates expected in 2025—a number projected to keep rising this decade. Much of the strain comes from structural shifts: emerging industries lack skilled talent, while traditional fields like civil engineering and architectural design, tied to the slowing real estate sector, are seeing major job cuts.

In an interview with the news outlet The Paper, Zhang Duanhong, Director of the Education Policy Research Center at Tongji University, noted that weak employment prospects in certain majors, and growing skills mismatches, updating the program catalogue has become a systematic policy tool to promote dynamic alignment between academic programs, industry needs, job roles, and technical standards—addressing the root cause of employment difficulties through better supply-demand matching.

In recent years, the adjustment and optimization of academic programs at Chinese universities has drawn widespread attention. As early as 2023, the Ministry of Education and four other departments released a reform plan to adjust and optimize academic disciplines and majors in higher education, aiming to reshape about 25% of university program offerings by 2025. 

The plan called for the launch of new disciplines and majors aligned with emerging technologies, industries, business models, and formats, while phasing out those no longer suited to economic and social development. Since then, efforts to dynamically adjust undergraduate programs have intensified.

In 2024, the Ministry of Education launched pilot projects in five regions—Heilongjiang, Zhejiang, Henan, Chongqing, and Shaanxi. These regions focused on developing 172 cross-university clusters of specialized majors aligned with local industrial hubs valued at hundreds of billions to trillions of yuan. 

Put simply, universities should train students based on the needs of industry. This highly aligned model of talent cultivation—where academic programs closely match industrial demands—is expected to expand rapidly across the country, with other provinces and cities likely to follow suit.

The data from Zhaopin, an online recruitment portal, showed that in the first week of the spring recruitment season this year, the number of job seekers in the artificial intelligence sector rose by 33.4% year-on-year, ranking first among all industries. Demand for positions such as drone, pharmaceutical, telecom network, and automotive mechanical engineers—key roles in emerging and future industries—also saw significant growth.

(Dai Xuelin, as an intern, also contributed to this report.)