Autumn has arrived, and with it arrive fresh cohorts of first-year university students at campuses around the country. After three gruelling years of senior high school and a refreshing summer break, they’re ready to dive into a new phase of life. As is included by many college deans in their welcome speeches to new students, “Autumn is the season of hope and harvest. Study hard and you will be rewarded.”
In addition to the new students, universities are also embracing a group of newly registered or adjusted majors. At the time of writing, “changes in college majors” is one of the hottest topics on social media platforms Xiaohongshu and Weibo, with hundreds of thousands of freshmen and senior high school students expressing their excitement at the latest changes. Many alumni are commenting on the future potential of new majors based on their experience, while others are lamenting the axing of the majors they had studied.
High school students are also looking forward to studying the new majors. “I’m going to apply for biological breeding technology. I developed an interest in biology in middle school, and this major embraces the cutting-edge biological technology and is more promising than general biology. I can’t wait to attend my first class next year,” one senior high school student from Shandong Province, surnamed Zheng, posted under the “changes in college majors” hashtag, along with screenshots of his dream university announcing the new major as part of its 2024 enrollment plan.
Zheng’s target major of biological breeding technology is among the 24 new majors added to the Ministry of Education (MOE)’s Undergraduate Program Catalogue for Regular Higher Education Institutions. The latest version of the catalogue, published this spring, include 816 programs, up from 792 last year. The new majors are listed under seven categories, namely law, education, literature, engineering, agronomy, management and the arts.
Notably, 30 out of the 57 higher education institutions that have introduced new majors in 2024 launched the soccer studies program, which draws attention as an attempt to improve China’s poor soccer performance in recent years. Popular comments from netizens include “We need more soccer talent” and “It’s such a timely shift. No more scores of zero please.”
Nurturing the new
The recent changes are in line with a document passed by the MOE in May 2023, calling on higher education institutions to optimize at least 20 percent of the majors they offered, either by modifying existing majors to cater to the latest changes in society and technology, establishing new, promising majors that will drive the future innovation, or by removing the majors that have not recruited new students for over five years. The document covers both undergraduate and graduate programs.
The biggest change occurred within the engineering category, with half of the 24 new majors falling under this category. Most of these new programs include the words “intelligent” in their names or are interdisciplinary in nature, such as intelligent material technology, intelligent vision engineering and cross-discipline engineering. The shift in engineering majors aims to make traditional engineering education more focused on digital and intelligent technologies, and to integrate it with other relevant disciplines to create more practical majors, making graduates more employable.
In a paper co-published by Li Peigen, a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, and Wu Zhengyang, a Ph.D. candidate at the School of Education of Huazhong University of Science and Technology, the scholars stated that many changes in majors have been made to suit the needs of economic development and national strategy, such as new-energy vehicle engineering, which helps to meet demand in China’s booming vehicle market, and cyberspace security and cryptography science and technology, reflecting the strengthened national security policy, while some other changes were driven by the technological innovations within other fields, including blockchain engineering and Internet of Things engineering.
“With the accumulation of technology over the last decade, many new technological fields within the engineering category are mature and systematic enough to be established as independent majors,” the essay reads.
The mushrooming of newly registered and modified majors has been meticulously supervised by relevant government departments and is expected to yield positive results for individuals and society at large.
“The process of establishing a new major is cautious and systematic. We have carefully evaluated the curriculum, qualifications of faculty, and the educational environment of each department that has applied to offer a new major, and assessed the future potential and the necessity of opening up them, guaranteeing the education quality and career future for each student entering the new fields,” Zhou Tianhua, head of the Department of Higher Education of the MOE, told news portal People.cn.
For example, the biological breeding technology major was established to meet the increasing need for high quality grain and increased food security, and will nurture a group of professionals with knowledge and practical experience of genetics, plant and animal breeding techniques, and related new technologies. Future graduates of the major are encouraged to hunt for jobs in agricultural or biotechnology enterprises. The curriculum of health science and technology incorporates knowledge from science, engineering and medication, leading students to make medical innovations and addressing the problems of China’s aging society.
A timely shift
In addition to introducing new majors, some universities have modified old majors in terms of curriculum, teaching methods and educational goals, while some other majors have been discontinued.
The MOE called on provinces and municipalities to establish an annual evaluation process to decide whether each individual major should be continued for the following year, based on student performance, the latest research development within the field, and graduate employment rate. In 2011, the MOE released an announcement encouraging the reduction in enrollment in or abolishment of majors that fail to achieve an average graduate employment rate of 60 percent in two consecutive years. This put many majors with low-employment rates in danger, especially the majors from arts, literature and management categories.
Many specific rules were introduced at provincial levels to prevent colleges from abolishing the majors casually. Sichuan Province, for example, states that institutions should reform majors with a graduate employment rate of less than 50 percent for two years in a row, and discontinue them if the rate fall below 50 percent for three years in a row. Heilongjiang Province added the number of applicants as another criterion for whether or not a major should be removed.
“My major, public administration, was discontinued by many colleges this year, including my alma mater,” 27-year-old Wang Chen told Beijing Review, adding that although she doesn’t work in the management field anymore, she misses her old major.
According to statistics from the MOE, from 2015 to 2021, 90 institutions nationwide abolished the public administration major.
“I guess it’s only natural, seeing that many of my peers and juniors are complaining about their salary, promotion opportunities and career plans; and it’s best that students will not choose the less employable majors that promise low incomes in the first place,” she added.
“The establishment and discontinuation of each major will be carefully assessed, and only in this way can the changes benefit the future of the modern university system and the economic development for long run,” Liu Ding, member of the MOE’s Steering Committee for Guidance in Teaching in Higher Education Institutions, told People.cn. –The Daily Mail-Beijing Review news exchange item
