Universities Are Quitting on Creative Degrees
The one thing you need to know in AI today | AI-Ready CMO
The junior pipeline is being cut at the source.
We’ve talked a lot about companies freezing junior hiring as AI takes over entry-level workflows. That was the demand side drying up. Now the supply side is following. China’s Communication University of China — one of the country’s most prestigious schools for creative talent — just suspended 16 undergraduate degree programs, including photography, comics, visual communication design, and translation. The party secretary said that the era of “human-machine collaboration” has arrived, and these programs no longer make sense as standalone degrees.
And this isn’t one university having a moment. Jilin University halted 19 arts majors in January. East China Normal University suspended 24 — including advertising and painting — late last year. Tongji University dropped visual communication and environmental design.
If you think this is some sort of a panic reaction, you are wrong. China’s universities are centrally controlled, and the Ministry of Education revoked over 1,400 programs in 2024 alone. This is policy.
And it won’t stay in China.
Western universities move slower because they’re decentralized, not because they disagree. The market logic is identical: when AI handles first-draft translation, basic image production, layout, and routine content creation, a four-year degree built primarily around those technical skills is training students for jobs that are going away. The institutions that move first just happen to be in a system where the government can push the button faster.
CUC didn’t just kill programs, though. It merged photography into film and television production. It folded comics into new AI-integrated degrees like “intelligent imaging art.” It has added 20 new majors since 2018.
The narrow, technique-heavy degree is what’s dying.
Photography as a craft still matters — a four-year program that teaches you only how to operate a camera is a different story. Same with translation: the skill is valuable, the degree that produces human translation machines competing against actual machines is not.
If you manage a creative team, this is the same story playing out in your org chart. The pure specialist — “I run Facebook ads,” “I do email design,” “I write product descriptions” — is the photography major of the corporate world.
The value is shifting toward people who can think across the stack: who understand why a campaign works, who can adapt when the tools change underneath them.
When you’re hiring juniors (if you still are), that’s the filter. Can they work with and around tools that will replace the tools they know today?
— Torsten and Peter
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