Faced with persistent unemployment among young graduates and the intensification of global technological competition, China is reshaping its higher education at a rapid pace.
Thousands of programs are being cut, suspended, or created to align training with the country’s industrial priorities. An impressive strategy in scope, but it does not constitute a magic solution or a model to be copied blindly.
For Tunisia, it raises a central question: how to adapt the university to the job market without sacrificing quality, critical thinking, and the ability to anticipate future transformations?
An overhaul of unprecedented scale
Between 2021 and 2025, Chinese universities have cut or suspended roughly 12,200 bachelor’s degree program offerings, while about 10,200 new offerings were approved.
This precision is important: it is not 12,200 distinct disciplines that disappeared from the Chinese university system. The same specialty can be cut in several institutions and opened elsewhere according to regional needs.
Together, the creations, closures, and suspensions amount to more than 30% of the cataloged program offerings. That does not necessarily mean that a third of national disciplines have been entirely replaced.
The movement extends a plan launched in 2023, which asked institutions to adjust about 20% of their specialty offerings by 2025. The authorities say that this target has been reached.
Universities are also encouraged to eliminate programs that have remained under-enrolled for a long time, which no longer recruit enough students or whose graduates face persistent employment difficulties.
What China cuts back, and what it develops
The reform is not simply about closing the humanities to open artificial intelligence schools.
The reductions concern a wide range of fields :
- some foreign languages;
- the arts;
- marketing;
- public administration;
- management;
- some civil engineering curricula;
- some technical specialties that have become oversized;
- programs deemed too distant from regional needs.
In parallel, the creations clearly favor sectors considered strategic :
- artificial intelligence;
- robotics;
- semiconductors;
- new materials;
- new energies;
- smart vehicles;
- embedded systems;
- aerospace and space;
- biomedicine;
- brain-machine interfaces;
- marine and subterranean engineering.
In 2026, authorities notably approved new interdisciplinary specialties around the future of robotics, energy, earth sciences and technologies spanning multiple traditional domains.
The official refrain is that of the “new, high-quality productive forces,” a term Beijing uses to designate activities capable of supporting industrial upgrading and China’s technological autonomy.
Youth unemployment as a driver of reform
Behind this transformation lies considerable social pressure.
In April 2026, the unemployment rate for urban 16-24-year-olds, excluding students, was still at 16.3%, after reaching 16.9% in March.
The scope deserves clarification: this figure does not include students still enrolled, rural youths, or those who have stopped actively seeking work.
The pressure is set to intensify with a record number of 12.7 million higher-education graduates entering the labor market in 2026, about 480,000 more than in 2025.
The university degree, once seen as a guarantee of social mobility, therefore no longer suffices to ensure rapid insertion into the job market.
Overqualified young people accept jobs far from their training, spend several years preparing for civil service exams, or turn to shorter professional trainings.
The university reform addresses this concern: to produce more graduates in the fields where industry hires, and gradually reduce capacity in oversaturated tracks.
The technological war behind the reform
Unemployment is not the only explanation.
The Chinese university restructuring is part of the technological rivalry with the United States and the desire to reduce the country’s dependence on foreign technologies.
The 15th five-year plan, covering the period 2026-2030, places central emphasis on innovation, artificial intelligence, new energies, advanced materials, and strategic technologies.
For Beijing, the university should not only train workers. It must directly support:
- research;
- industry;
- technological sovereignty;
- defense;
- the energy transition;
- regional competitiveness.
Higher education thus becomes an instrument of industrial policy.
A province specialized in electric vehicles can reinforce training in batteries, power electronics, and embedded software. A region oriented toward aerospace or semiconductors can develop its own “clusters of disciplines” around these industrial chains.
A data-driven reform
One of the most instructive aspects of the Chinese model lies in its method.
Decisions to open, reduce, or cut programs rely increasingly on up-to-date data concerning :
- the employment of graduates;
- business needs;
- sectoral recruitment;
- wages;
- industrial priorities;
- regional economic capacities;
- student applications;
- the quality of training.
University officials meet directly with companies to identify desired skills and to build new partnerships.
Some universities also track the career path of their graduates several years after graduation to measure the real alignment between the training received and the job obtained.
This logic breaks with a system where programs remain unchanged for decades, regardless of their employment rate.
But opening an AI field does not automatically create jobs
China’s voluntarism also has its limits.
Creating thousands of programs bearing the words “artificial intelligence,” “robotics,” or “advanced technologies” does not guarantee either their quality or the existence of sufficient job opportunities.
A university can open an AI bachelor’s program without having :
- sufficiently trained teachers;
- usable data;
- computing capacity;
- laboratories;
- industrial partnerships;
- internships;
- concrete projects.
A quantitative reform can thus simply move the saturation from one field to another.
Computer science graduates themselves are not protected against unemployment when their training remains too theoretical, their skills become quickly obsolete, or employers seek more experienced profiles.
The risk is to replace surplus graduates in management or humanities with surplus graduates in poorly designed technological specialties.
The danger of a university guided solely by the market
The university does not merely serve as a tool for immediate job placement.
It also trains :
- teachers;
- researchers;
- jurists;
- writers;
- journalists;
- historians;
- social workers;
- citizens capable of analyzing a society.
Too sharply reducing languages, humanities, or foundational disciplines in the name of profitability could weaken the intellectual capacities that a tech-driven economy itself needs.
Artificial intelligence does not erase the importance of reasoning, ethics, communication, law, or knowledge of societies. It increases the value of these skills when they are paired with solid digital culture.
Centralized drive also carries another danger: believing that the State or companies can precisely forecast the jobs of the next ten years.
Needs can evolve very quickly. A strategic specialty today may become saturated tomorrow, while a neglected discipline may regain unexpected importance.
A system that does not adapt creates skilled unemployment. A system that re-adjusts too abruptly to current fashions can create shortages and tomorrow’s surplus graduates.
The Tunisian mirror
The comparison with Tunisia is inevitable.
In the third quarter of 2025, unemployment among higher-education graduates reached 24.9%, up from 24% in the previous quarter.
The gender gap was particularly high :
- 14.5% among men;
- 32.3% among women.
In the fourth quarter of 2025, the rate fell to 22.5%, but the imbalance remained substantial :
- 11.7% among men;
- 30.5% among women.
Among youths aged 15 to 24, unemployment reached 38.4% by the end of 2025.
These data show that in Tunisia, a degree protects less and less against inactivity, particularly for young women.
Tens of thousands of graduates facing a tight market
Each year, tens of thousands of new graduates enter a market that creates too few qualified jobs to absorb them.
The problem does not only lie in the content of the programs.
It also stems from :
- weak investment;
- economic slowdown;
- the small size of firms;
- inadequate research and development;
- the concentration of opportunities in a few regions;
- wages offered;
- the lack of bridges between university and business.
Yet skills mismatches worsen the situation.
Some tracks continue to train more graduates than the market can hire, while companies report difficulties finding highly specialized profiles in cybersecurity, data, embedded systems, the cloud, industrial maintenance, or certain production technologies.
Thus, the Tunisian paradox can be summed up in one sentence: high unemployment among graduates on the one hand, targeted skill shortages on the other.
Brain drain further complicates the equation
Tunisia also trains professionals who later leave the country.
Doctors, engineers, IT specialists and researchers are drawn to Europe, North America, and Gulf countries.
This migration is not only the result of a mismatch in training.
It is also explained by :
- wage gaps;
- working conditions;
- available resources;
- career prospects;
- research funding;
- job stability.
Thus, the country can simultaneously experience graduate unemployment and lose scarce skills it needs.
Reforming the university offer without improving the economic environment would therefore not be enough.
The main difference: speed of response
China and Tunisia share a diagnosis: universities and the economy do not always progress at the same pace.
The difference lies mainly in the ability to act.
China changed thousands of programs in a few years. In Tunisia, revising curricula, opening new specialties, and closing oversaturated tracks can take much longer.
Some programs continue to admit large cohorts even though their graduates have faced the same difficulties for several years.
Conversely, new tracks are sometimes created without sufficient equipment, without specialized teachers, or without durable partnerships with industry.
Thus, slowness is not the only problem. The quality of execution matters as well.
