Artificial intelligence (AI) is changing both the jobs people do and the skills employers seek. As companies use AI to perform tasks that once required human intellectual effort, demand is growing for workers who can apply the technology to improve productivity.
This is forcing countries to rethink how they prepare their future workforce. China has taken a direct approach. It is linking higher education more closely with labour-market demand, emerging technologies and national industrial priorities.
In the recent past, the country has cut thousands of university programmes while adding courses in areas such as AI, robotics and other technology-intensive fields. It is also building mechanisms to use employment and industry data to guide programme changes.
Why did China need to reform higher education?
China's current reforms in the sector follow a rapid expansion of higher education that began in the late 1990s.
In 1999, China launched a major expansion of higher education. Between 1999 and 2004, new undergraduate enrolments grew at an annual rate of 26.1 per cent, while graduate enrolments grew 28.6 per cent, according to a British Council overview of China's higher education system published in 2014.
By 2012, the country had more than 31 million post-secondary students.
The expansion helped move China from an elite to a mass higher education system. But it also created challenges around quality, the structure of academic programmes and graduate employment.
The British Council report identified structural unemployment as one of the problems facing the system. It said China had nearly 7 million higher education graduates in 2012, while the country still faced shortages of technical talent in specific areas. It argued that higher education needed to respond to changing labour-market demand.
The mismatch has become more visible as China's economy has shifted towards technology-intensive sectors. According to Xinhua, China faces shortages of more than 5 million AI workers, 2.3 million big-data workers, more than 1 million new-energy vehicle workers and another 1 million drone operators. At the same time, the country is building a database to analyse workforce demand and forecast supply-demand trends.
What exactly is China changing?
One of the clearest changes is the regular restructuring of university programmes.
During the 2021-25 period, Chinese universities added 10,200 undergraduate programmes while cutting or suspending 12,200, according to China Daily. The adjustment rate exceeded 10 per cent for the first time.
The changes include programmes linked to AI, robotics, brain-computer technology, digital industries, advanced manufacturing and new energy. China has also created mechanisms to fast-track programmes linked to urgent national priorities.
The system is also moving towards greater use of labour-market information. China's education authorities have proposed a national big-data platform for talent supply and demand. The platform is designed to support employment services, analyse disciplines and provide information that can help universities adjust programmes.
This makes the reform different from simply adding more AI courses. It creates a system in which university programmes are expected to respond more frequently to economic and technological changes.
Dr Romi Jain, Executive Editor of the Indian Journal of Asian Affairs, said China's higher education policy operates at the intersection of economic development, innovation and state priorities.
“China is strategically refashioning its higher education sector as a launchpad for talent... or hi-tech talent base,” she said.
Jain said India has also moved in this direction through the
National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 and the IndiaAI Mission. But India's approach is more decentralised, relying on localised AI roadmaps and a state-wise framework.
From knowledge delivery to skills and application
The changes also raise an important question about what universities should do in the AI era.
Pawan Agarwal, a higher education expert who has worked with the Planning Commission (now NITI Aayog) and the Ministry of Human Resource Development, said government and universities do not have to choose between state intervention and institutional autonomy.
“The government has to nudge the universities, but not by the way of directions and regulations, but enable them to do so,” he said. Universities, he added, would have to adapt to changing market needs to remain relevant.
Agarwal said AI is also changing the way higher education itself is delivered. He identified three shifts: rote learning is becoming less relevant, a one-size-fits-all curriculum is no longer appropriate, and traditional lectures are becoming less important as a method of information dissemination.
He said universities will need to combine AI skills with human skills, increase project-based learning and create more personalised learning structures.
Deloitte India's Partner Kamlesh Vyas also said that universities functioning primarily as knowledge disseminators would have to adapt to new demands of the labour market.
“As AI shapes industries and job roles, the demand will shift to a combination of domain skills, functional skills, critical thinking skills and frontier tech like AI skills in varying degrees,” Vyas said.
He said universities would need to work with industry, the skilling ecosystem and the entrepreneurship ecosystem. Their role, he added, should increasingly include deliberation, debate, project work, start-ups, research and mentoring.
Should India follow China's model?
India can adopt some elements of China's approach, but the experts caution against treating the Chinese model as a template.
Jain said India could consider regular curriculum reviews and measures to future-proof skills. But she cautioned against aggressively eliminating humanities, liberal arts or social science programmes based only on economic considerations.
“These foundational subjects must be allowed to blossom through theoretical and conceptual contributions,” she said, adding that they remain important for critical thinking and social innovation.
“Further, while the CPC steers the destiny in
China, its education policy and practice are tightly tied to the stability of the party through strict ideological controls. It will not be blossoming for India to bring up a citizenry devoid of independent thinking. How India succeeds depends entirely on how it harnesses the power of
AI for talent and modern skills, while actively protecting room for free thinking and critical dialogue,” Jain added.
For India, the challenge is therefore to make higher education more responsive without making it entirely dependent on current industry demand.
According to experts, technology itself can make workforce planning difficult. A course designed around today's demand may face a different job market by the time students graduate, they said.
Jain said skills such as critical thinking, judgment, accuracy and strategic communication are becoming more important as
AI changes work.
She further warned that outsourcing analytical thinking to AI could “weaken independent reasoning.”
Agarwal similarly argued that AI is changing the value of traditional intellectual skills.
Accounting, language and numerical skills, he said, are less important in their earlier form because technology can perform many such tasks faster. He said human skills and the ability to use AI to handle these tasks will become more important.
What can India take from China?
The most transferable part of
China's approach may not be its centralised decision-making, but the idea of making higher education more responsive.
Vyas said India could adapt China's focus on entrepreneurship, regular curriculum reviews, strategic reviews and industry integration. He also cited China's vocational education system, where students can pursue technical education and build careers through specialised institutions.
But such changes would require coordination across government, universities, industry, skilling, research and entrepreneurship.
“Our education system has the potential to undertake a transformation,” Vyas said. “The required change needs us to move beyond the rhetoric and collaborate.”
Agarwal said the direction is already partly visible in India's NEP. The larger task is to ensure that universities can adapt to market changes while retaining enough flexibility to prepare students for jobs and technologies that may not yet exist.
China's experience therefore may give India a policy question rather than a ready-made model: how closely should universities respond to the economy, and how much room should they retain to prepare students for a future that cannot be predicted with certainty?
 "How China is redesigning higher education, and should India follow?")
