The Ministry of Education has published the results of the 2021 round of undergraduate programme registrations and approvals, and universities have been posting their new degrees — many of them the same degree. Artificial intelligence, it turns out, was this year’s popular addition.
Under the list, 95 universities registered a new AI major for 2022. That is both encouraging and worrying.
Encouraging, because an AI degree answers a national strategic need and lines up with where the technology and the industry actually are.
On policy, the State Council’s new-generation AI development plan explicitly calls for building the discipline: refining the subject layout and establishing the major. On the industry side, AI has moved into real applications across sectors, and the growth of the core industry has produced strong demand for graduates. One research institute estimated in 2020 that China was short of 300,000 AI specialists.
With so many universities responding to policy, the supply of talent should follow, and the technology and the industry will have people coming through behind them.
The worry is the other side of it. AI is technically demanding and moves fast, and the teaching capacity is still being assembled, which makes launching a degree a real challenge.
Strictly, a university needs a full faculty able to teach the subject at a high level, and it needs the curriculum to keep up, or students graduate having learned what the market no longer uses. As a new discipline, AI is short of qualified teachers and shorter still of experienced ones; the course structure and the training model are being worked out as they go. Every institution that opens the major will have to deal with this.
The universities on this year’s list range from the top of the country’s rankings to ordinary local institutions, and from science and engineering schools to colleges specialising in media or tourism.
Whichever category a university falls into, the reminder is the same: the field is hot, but opening a major in order to be seen in the field is not the same as teaching it. Only sustained work makes the degree mean what it says rather than a name on a prospectus, and only that produces the graduates the country and the economy actually need.
Republished for information. The original text has not been independently verified and does not necessarily reflect our views.
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