China Is Ditching Degrees for the AI Era.
Who Teaches the New Ones?
China is dropping "obsolete" university degree courses to prepare for the AI era. Everyone's debating which degrees. That's the easy question. The hard one nobody's asking: who is actually qualified to teach the new ones?
The easy question
The news doing the rounds: China is ditching "obsolete" university degree courses to prepare for the AI era.
Everyone's arguing about the curriculum — which degrees should go, which should stay. That's the easy question. The hard one nobody's asking: who is actually qualified to teach the new ones?
Cutting a degree takes a memo. Teaching the thing that replaces it takes someone who has actually done it — and that's where it falls apart.
Who can actually teach it
In most universities, the people who would teach AI are academics who have never operated it. They've read about it, maybe published on it. But running AI inside a real business — making it cut cost, produce content, close a sale, hold up under a customer complaint — is a craft, and you can't teach a craft you've never practised. You can change the syllabus overnight. You cannot change who's standing in front of the class.
I've seen this before
When livestreaming hit e-commerce, most business owners and marketers had no idea what it was or why it had suddenly become the main channel. That gap — between a trend arriving and the market understanding it — never fully closed. And before it could, AI landed on top of it. Two waves stacked, no time to digest the first.
Two questions
So I keep coming back to two:
1. How do universities tackle this shift when they don't have the expertise to transform — let alone build the courses? You can't outsource your way to credibility in front of students who'll use this every day.
2. How does a business tell a genuine AI expert from a repackaged-course seller? Is what they teach useful on Monday morning, or just impressive on a slide?
The test
This is exactly why China ditching degrees doesn't surprise me — and why we've taken the operator's route. We're working with a reputable Malaysian university to launch a programme of 10 AI courses built from a business-operations perspective — not the IT angle most institutions reach for — taught from the system we actually run, white-labelling our own Ultra Studio. Built by people who operate AI daily, for people who need to operate it tomorrow.
The degrees being cut aren't the story. The story is that the world is short of people who can credibly teach what comes next — and the few who can are usually the ones quietly doing the work, not the ones loudest about it.
If you're at a university trying to make this shift, or a business trying to tell signal from noise in the AI-course market, I'm happy to compare notes — a candid conversation, not a pitch.
Operators, not gurus.
Published by IMA AI — June 2026.