When Beijing deleted 12,000 degrees: A reckoning India cannot afford to ignore

In July 2025, the South China Morning Post told the story of Ding Yuanzhao, a 39-year-old scientist delivering food on the streets of Beijing.

Ding had earned a chemistry degree from Tsinghua University, a master’s in energy engineering from Peking University, a PhD in biology from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, and a second master's in biodiversity from Oxford. Yet after more than 10 job interviews led nowhere, he concluded that the most reliable way to support himself was gig work for Meituan, China’s largest food delivery platform.

Estimates suggest that 20% delivery drivers on China’s two largest platforms hold university degrees, and that tens of thousands hold master's degrees. China produced graduates at industrial scale for two decades and created an economy that needed far fewer of them than it had trained.

To address this widening degree-to-job mismatch, Beijing revoked or suspended 12,200 undergraduate programmes while introducing 10,200 new ones between 2021 and 2025. More than 30% of university programmes underwent adjustment. The cuts were concentrated in arts, humanities, foreign languages, and management. In their place arrived degrees in brain-computer interfaces, agricultural robotics, low-altitude drone technologies, and carbon-neutrality engineering.

China’s logic is not hard to understand. With 12.7 million graduates entering the labour market in 2026 and youth unemployment remaining stubbornly high, standing still was not an option. The critics of Beijing’s approach deserve a hearing because the costs may only become visible years from now.

The first cost is intellectual. Critical thinking, ethical reasoning, historical perspective and cross-cultural communication are precisely the capabilities that become more valuable in an AI-driven economy. They are the foundation of judgement. They allow future leaders and engineers to ask whether a technology should be built, not merely whether it can be.

The second cost is structural. Many of the programmes China eliminated had been created only a few years earlier during previous reform cycles and had little time to prove themselves. By the time a student enrolled today graduates from a four-year programme, the technological landscape will have changed several times. Locking students into hyper-specialised programmes designed around today’s shortages may create tomorrow’s mismatches.

Ding’s story may feel distant. It is not.

India and China have very different political systems, demographic trajectories, and labour markets. Yet both face a common challenge: how to prepare millions of young people for an economy being reshaped by artificial intelligence, automation, and rapid technological change.

India produces more than 10 million higher education graduates annually. Yet India’s Skills Report 2025 finds that only 54.8% are considered employable. Employers complain of talent shortages while graduates struggle to find meaningful work. The paradox should concern us as much as it concerns Beijing.

The choice is not between employability and liberal education. It is between preparing students for their first job and preparing them for a 50-year career in an economy that will change repeatedly. Human capital remains India’s greatest strategic advantage. No natural resource, manufacturing subsidy or industrial policy can substitute for the capabilities of millions of young Indians.

NEP 2020 is a significant step forward. The four-year undergraduate structure, the Academic Bank of Credits and the emphasis on multidisciplinary learning represent important reforms. But India has a long history of excellent education policy that stopped at the page. Three things need to happen now.

First, measure outcomes rather than inputs. India’s university ambitions are currently measured by the wrong instruments. QS and Times Higher Education rankings reward research output and citations.

Even the NIRF framework measures graduation outcomes mainly through pass rates rather than what graduates actually go on to do. None of them tell an 18-year-old the single most important thing they need to know: what happened to the last five batches of graduates from this specific programme at this specific institution? Australia’s Graduate Outcomes Survey does exactly that. It publishes employment rates, median salaries and employer satisfaction data by institution and field of study, making outcomes transparent to students and families. When full-time employment outcomes weaken, institutions face scrutiny and pressure to respond. The UGC should require all higher education institutions to publish annual programme-level employment outcomes. This will give students information that currently only employers and HR departments possess.

Second, build hybrid graduates rather than narrower specialists. China’s reforms risk creating a binary: technicians on one track and a shrinking cohort of humanities graduates on another. India should consciously avoid that mistake. Singapore’s AI Apprenticeship Programme has demonstrated that graduates from diverse disciplines can successfully transition into advanced technology careers through focused, industry-linked training. The future belongs neither to pure coders nor pure generalists. It belongs to people who can combine technical fluency with human judgement. Every undergraduate programme in India should include meaningful exposure to data, computational reasoning and AI tools. Equally, every technical programme should strengthen communication, ethics, critical thinking and problem-solving. Think of an economics student who can interpret a regression model, a history student who can build a dataset, a commerce student who can use AI to analyse financial scenarios, an engineer who understands society and public policy. These are increasingly the people employers are actively looking for and failing to find.

Third, create multiple pathways to success. One of the most underappreciated lessons from advanced economies is that not every successful career begins with a traditional university degree. Germany and Switzerland have built world-class apprenticeship ecosystems that provide structured transitions from education into employment.

Students earn, learn and acquire industry-relevant skills simultaneously. Employers gain access to talent. Young people gain access to careers. India has made important investments in vocational education and ITI modernisation. But infrastructure alone will not solve the problem. Social prestige remains overwhelmingly attached to degrees, regardless of their economic value. Only about 4% of Indians of working age have received formal vocational training. A national apprenticeship mission should become a central pillar of India's human capital strategy. The goal should be ambitious: at least one million high-quality apprenticeship opportunities annually within this decade, a target that would require ambition well beyond current ITI modernisation plans, supported by industry, government and educational institutions.

The lesson is not that India should imitate China's surgery. Nor is it that universities should become vocational factories responding to every labour-market fluctuation. The real lesson is that education systems must create adaptable people, not merely job-ready for their first job.

Ding Yuanzhao’s story is not tragic because he delivers food. It is tragic because the system that produced him made an implicit promise it could not keep. India makes that same promise to more than 10 million young people every year. The task before us is to ensure that the credentials we issue mean something, that the skills behind them are real, and that the pathways beyond them are open. India’s demographic dividend is the largest single asset this country holds, and the foundation on which Viksit Bharat will either be built or squandered. Whether it becomes an advantage or a burden will be decided, more than anywhere else, in our classrooms.

(Dhawan is founding chairperson, Ashoka University; Narayan is founding director, InfoEdge Centre for Entrepreneurship, Ashoka University. Views are personal.)