news

in recent years

the frequency of optimization and adjustment of majors in colleges and universities has accelerated significantly

not long ago

24 new majors officially included

2024 catalog of undergraduate majors in general colleges and universities

and conducted enrollment

but at the same time

many universities have officially announced

some majors have withdrawn or suspended enrollment

several majors from universities in beijing have recently been “offline”

on september 26, the state council information office held a series of press conferences with the theme of "promoting high-quality development". wu yan, vice minister of the ministry of education, mentioned at the meeting that this year, 1,673 majors in urgently needed national strategic positions have been added and 1,670 majors that are not suitable for economic and social development have been cancelled. the adjustment is unprecedented.

in july this year, the graduate school of beijing language and culture university announced that it plans to stop recruiting seven translation majors in 2025, including russian translation, japanese translation, japanese interpretation, german translation, korean translation, korean interpretation, and spanish translation.

the admissions office of the central conservatory of music issued an "important notice for undergraduate enrollment in 2025". the school will suspend undergraduate enrollment in the three admissions directions of music art management, music therapy, and music recording.

in august, the academic affairs office of china university of petroleum (beijing) issued the "notice on the proposed cancellation of undergraduate majors in 2024", which plans to cancel 9 undergraduate majors including architecture, visual communication design, musicology, and public utility management.

in addition, many domestic universities such as lanzhou university, northwest university, shandong university, and chongqing jiaotong university have successively announced adjustments to their majors, including liberal arts majors such as chinese language, advertising, and public utility management, as well as science and engineering majors such as civil engineering. .

sichuan university went even further and announced the cancellation of 31 majors, including musicology, performance, animation, insurance, electronic information science and technology, confidentiality management, industrial design, network engineering, metallurgical engineering, safety engineering, information security, etc.

according to statistics, more than 20 colleges and universities have planned to withdraw or suspend enrollment in some majors in 2024, involving more than 100 majors.

according to the registration and approval results of undergraduate majors in general universities from 2018 to 2022 by the ministry of education, in terms of the discipline categories of canceled majors, engineering ranked first with a proportion of 30.95%, becoming the discipline type with the largest number of cancellations, while management and science were the most withdrawn. followed by. in addition, humanities, social sciences, and art majors in some engineering colleges are also the focus of cancellation, and the overall cancellation rate is on the rise.

the canceled major is not a "bad major"

domestic colleges and universities are experiencing an unprecedented professional adjustment cycle.

in march 2023, the ministry of education and other five departments issued the "reform plan for adjustment, optimization and reform of subject and major settings in general higher education", proposing that by 2025, about 20% of the subject and major placements in colleges and universities will be optimized and adjusted, and a new batch of disciplines and majors adapted to new technologies, new industries, and new business formats and new model disciplines and majors will be developed, and disciplines and majors that are not suitable for economic and social development will be eliminated.

it is worth noting that the withdrawal or suspension of a major does not mean that the major is a "bad major". whether a certain major is adjusted will be affected by many factors such as employment quality, professional development, and department adjustment.

analysts believe that an important consideration for the revocation of majors is the low employment rate, especially for majors such as philosophy and history. although they have irreplaceable value, they are listed as candidates for revocation due to relatively low market demand.

secondly, some majors with high employment rates may also be withdrawn, especially some engineering majors, most of which are no longer compatible with industrial development. for example, traditional manufacturing and outdated technical fields are no longer able to adapt to the needs of modern industry.

in addition, most of the revoked majors lack special features for the schools where they are located. for example, some comprehensive colleges do not have obvious characteristics in the field of art majors. although students can enroll in art majors as they wish, the content they learn and the situations they face after graduation are more complicated than expected. .

professional revocation is both an opportunity and a challenge

behind the adjustment of the list of majors in colleges and universities, there are both opportunities and challenges. the withdrawal of majors is an important measure to adapt to social needs and improve the quality of education.

in response to issues such as the establishment and cancellation of university majors, zhou guangli, dean of the school of education at renmin university of china and executive director of the evaluation research center, believes that the adjustment of university majors should be considered from multiple dimensions: professional positioning, social needs, student evaluation, teaching staff, employment results, etc. this requires comprehensive market demand analysis and quantitative effectiveness evaluation. “only evidence-based decisions are truly rational.”

chu zhaohui, a researcher at the chinese academy of educational sciences, said that the withdrawal of majors is a routine and benign measure for the dynamic adjustment of majors in colleges and universities. the optimization and adjustment of disciplines and majors in colleges and universities have been ongoing in the past. educational policy guidance, highlighting the characteristics of running schools, and matching the direction of talent training have all become influencing factors. .

wu yan said that in the next step, the ministry of education will dynamically adjust the requirements for subject majors and work hard on three degrees of adaptability:

1. it is necessary to improve the degree of compatibility between undergraduate major construction and national strategies.

first of all, we must deepen the construction of the "four new", which refers to the construction of new engineering, new medicine, new agriculture, and new liberal arts. secondly, focus on the frontiers of science and technology and key national strategic areas, lay out emerging majors, and expand the distribution of urgently needed majors. in particular, we must improve the responsiveness of university majors and talent training to high-quality development, and cultivate national strategic talents and urgently needed talents in a more targeted manner.

2. it is necessary to improve the adaptability of professional construction of universities, especially local universities, and regional development.

at the beginning of this year, an assessment of the matching between university majors and regional development was carried out in heilongjiang, zhejiang, henan, chongqing, shaanxi and other provinces and cities, and the scope will be further expanded next year. through this initiative, we will actively promote local regions to combine regional development, especially the actual industrial development, to create advantageous and characteristic professional clusters, build a linkage development mechanism between higher education and industrial clusters, and better serve regional development.

3. it is necessary to improve the compatibility between undergraduate major construction and students’ all-round development

we will use artificial intelligence to empower the construction of professional connotations, optimize talent training plans in a targeted manner, improve the knowledge map and competency map of each major, and comprehensively improve the quality of education and teaching. promote colleges and universities to correctly grasp the relationship between knowledge learning and all-round development (the relationship between intellectual education and the "five educations" of moral, intellectual, physical, artistic, and labor), strengthen the cultivation of core competencies, and strive to cultivate new people of the era who have both political integrity and talent, are physically and mentally healthy, energetic, and pursue their dreams.

no matter which major you study

i hope all students will have a correct understanding of

continuously improve your professional capabilities

there will be stronger competitiveness in the future

source: capital education wechat official account

process editor: u022