New Delhi, July 14 -- China is rapidly redrawing its higher education landscape, replacing more than 12,000 university programmes in arts, humanities, foreign languages and management with courses in artificial intelligence (AI), semiconductors and robotics over the past five years.

Driven by the race for AI leadership and the need to tackle rising graduate unemployment, Beijing is aligning higher education more closely with labour market demand. Similar shifts are underway globally as AI becomes integral to university curricula.

Should India follow suit? If India's jobs crisis is increasingly a skills crisis, rising demand for AI workers may require a fundamental rethink of what universities teach.

Beijing's decision to phase out thou...