China is reshaping its education system for the AI age.
Beijing on Monday announced plans to integrate AI across all levels of schooling, while universities in recent years have revoked or suspended 12,200 so-called “obsolete” undergraduate degree programs, many of which were in the humanities, and introduced 10,200 new ones, like embodied intelligence.
The pivot shows how Beijing’s centralized control lets the government overhaul its system in response to economic and technological shifts, whereas critics bemoan the West’s institutional inertia.
“The old path — where you study one specific major, find a perfectly matched job, and stay in it stably for a lifetime — simply does not exist any more,” a Beijing-based executive told the South China Morning Post.