China AI Degree Cuts: Beijing University Drops 16 Majors

Most debates about AI and jobs focus on the workplace: which roles will shrink, which will change and which will survive. At the Communication University of China (CUC) in Beijing, that debate has already reached the course catalogue.

In 2025, the university cut or merged a total of 16 bachelor's programmes. Photography and translation no longer exist as standalone degrees. Comics, fashion design and visual communication design were also among the affected programmes. According to Liao Xiangzhong, the university's Party secretary, the reason is the progress of artificial intelligence.

"A waste of resources"

Liao's argument is blunt. In his view, AI has already largely taken over translation, so a four-year degree devoted only to that skill wastes resources. He applied similar reasoning to photography, saying the classic form of the discipline can no longer stand on its own as a separate subject.

His comments first sparked debate in March 2026, and they are now drawing attention again. The question behind the controversy is a practical one for any university: how quickly should teaching respond to a technology that is still changing?

What was actually cut, and what replaced it

After the criticism, Liao clarified that the subjects have not simply vanished. Photography has been folded into the film photography and production programme, which is also meant to cover image composition and post-processing. The skill is still taught, just no longer as its own degree.

At the same time, CUC has added new programmes with an explicit AI focus. These include intelligent image art, intelligent audiovisual technology, and intelligent engineering and creative design.

The cuts were not limited to creative subjects. Of the 16 programmes affected:

• five came from the arts
• three from the humanities
• six from economics and management
• two from the natural sciences and engineering

The overhaul is also part of a longer process. CUC has been revising its programme portfolio regularly since 2018, and by 2025 it had introduced 20 new degree programmes along the way.

A national restructuring

The Beijing university is not an outlier. Between 2021 and 2025, Chinese higher education institutions closed or suspended 12,200 bachelor's programmes and launched 10,200 new ones. That means more than 30% of the country's undergraduate offering has changed in five years.

The reform is not driven only by technology. It also aligns universities more closely with state development goals, so AI is one factor in a broader policy of steering higher education towards national priorities.

Language degrees appear particularly exposed. A survey of 70 universities counted eight discontinued Japanese programmes, five German programmes and five translation programmes. These are the fields where Liao's argument about AI translation applies most directly.

Adapting instead of abolishing

Not every institution is choosing to cut. Some are reshaping existing courses around the new tools. CUC itself offers one example: in a Swahili translation course, students now learn how to direct AI translation systems and assess the quality of their output.

That approach reflects a different reading of the same trend. Translation work does not disappear. Instead, the skill shifts from producing a text from scratch to guiding a machine and checking its results. The expertise is still needed, but it is applied at a different point in the process.

Why it matters

Universities plan degrees years ahead, while AI capabilities shift from one release to the next. Predicting that gap is difficult, and even experts have tended to misjudge the pace of AI progress. Cutting a programme too early risks losing expertise that is still valuable. Cutting it too late risks training students for work that has already changed.

CUC's decisions show one way of handling that uncertainty: fold traditional skills into broader programmes, add AI-focused degrees, and retrain students to work alongside the tools rather than compete with them. With more than 30% of China's undergraduate programmes reshaped in five years, the country is running that experiment at a scale few other education systems have attempted.