China's higher education institutions have accelerated the adjustment of departmental and major offerings in recent years, significantly enhancing their capacity to serve national strategies and support high-quality economic and social development. The Ministry of Education released the "Undergraduate Program Catalog for Regular Higher Education Institutions (2026 Edition)" today, revealing the addition of 38 new undergraduate majors this year, including Low-Altitude Economy and Management. The current undergraduate catalog now encompasses 13 disciplinary categories, 92 major classes, and 883 specific majors.
According to the Ministry's website, efforts to optimize program offerings continued this year, guiding and supporting universities in actively adding new majors that serve national strategic needs and the demands of modern industrial development. New programs were precisely aligned with national priorities, such as Energy Science and Engineering and Deep Earth Science and Engineering. To support the optimization and upgrading of traditional industries, majors like Integrated Transportation and Energy Engineering and Agricultural Robotics were added. For fostering innovation in emerging and future industries, programs including Bio-manufacturing and Brain-Computer Science and Technology were introduced. Focusing on expanding and improving the service sector, additions were made in areas like Digital Culture and Tourism and Commercial Artificial Intelligence. To help build new forms of intelligent economy, majors such as Digital Trade and Digital Finance were established.
Concurrently, mechanisms for exceptionally setting up strategically critical majors were further refined. Nine universities, including Harbin Institute of Technology and Beihang University, were supported in adding the new major of Embodied Intelligence, promoting the deep integration of the new generation of artificial intelligence with the real economy and empowering high-quality economic and social development.
Data shows that during the "14th Five-Year Plan" period, Chinese universities added 10,200 new undergraduate program sites, while discontinuing or suspending enrollment in 12,200 others. The scale of program adjustments has continued to increase, with a cumulative adjustment ratio exceeding 30%. This year, the national adjustment ratio for university programs surpassed 10% for the first time, leading to a further optimization of the undergraduate program structure.
In August 2025, the Central Leading Group for Education issued the "Action Plan for the Adjustment and Optimization of Higher Education Discipline and Major Settings (2025-2027)", which provided a systematic deployment for deepening this work. The plan proposed actions including the exceptional layout of urgently needed disciplines and majors, targeting strategic emerging industries and future industries for rapid deployment of program sites. It also included actions to enhance fundamental disciplines, incubate emerging and interdisciplinary disciplines, optimize existing programs, update the content of disciplines and majors, and deepen the reform of training models.
This year's Government Work Report mentioned the need to improve the mechanism for aligning talent cultivation with economic and social development needs, promote university reforms by category, dynamically adjust disciplines and majors, launch a new round of "Double First-Class" initiative construction, build national interdisciplinary centers, and increase the independent cultivation of top-notch innovative talent.
The Ministry of Education also stated that to strengthen the coordinated linkage of discipline and major catalogs and better adapt to the development of emerging interdisciplinary fields and the need for cultivating interdisciplinary talent, the 2026 undergraduate catalog has, for the first time, listed 11 existing majors and 4 newly added majors under the "Interdisciplinary" category. These include Future Robotics, Cross-disciplinary Engineering, Embodied Intelligence, and Brain-Computer Science and Technology.
Furthermore, last December, the Academic Degrees Committee of the State Council issued management measures for pilot "Doctor + Master" dual-degree programs, allowing pilot universities to autonomously establish such programs, supporting doctoral students in concurrently pursuing a master's degree in another discipline. Recently, several universities have launched these dual-degree programs, encouraging doctoral students to also earn a master's degree in a relevant field like AI. Multiple provinces have also publicized lists of composite talent cultivation projects for dual bachelor's degrees in 2026.
Universities are also speeding up the reorganization of internal schools. Since last year, a number of "Double First-Class" universities have intensively announced the establishment of new schools, focusing on urgently needed frontier technologies and emerging sectors such as artificial intelligence, future technologies, aerospace technology, quantum technology, AI+, and information dissemination. Overall, this wave of adjustments essentially represents a shift in internal school organization from being divided by discipline to being restructured around problems, needs, and technologies.
An analysis suggests that the purpose of these reorganizations is to cultivate interdisciplinary composite talent. The boundaries between many disciplines have become blurred and are now integrating. By adjusting departments and majors, universities can adapt to the practical demands of the market economy and cultivate more innovative talent that aligns with the development of productive forces.