Chinese universities are announcing one after another that they are stopping the recruitment of foreign language majors. In China, foreign language majors have poor job prospects after graduation, and with the rapid development of AI, their demand is shrinking even further.
Chinese financial media outlet Caixin reported that the University of International Business and Economics and Beijing Foreign Studies University recently announced they would stop recruiting master’s students for certain foreign language programs, including Japanese translation and Italian interpretation. Beijing Foreign Studies University, a renowned language institution, has also decided to stop recruiting master’s students for Korean translation and interpretation.
In May, Qilu University in Shandong Province, close to South Korea, announced the suspension of nine undergraduate language programs, including Korean and German, as part of its “2023 Major Adjustment Report.”
According to the Chinese Ministry of Education’s report “New and Approved Programs at General Higher Education Institutions (2018-2022),” at least 101 universities have eliminated foreign language programs over the past five years. The most frequent cuts affected Japanese, English, and Korean programs, likely because these three majors are the most widely offered.
Although not an outright suspension, Beijing University’s Korean language department failed to meet its enrollment quota of 10 students during this year’s regular admissions and had to recruit additional students. The declining popularity of Korean majors is partly due to the worsening relations between China and South Korea. Still, the bigger factor is the bleak job prospects for foreign language majors, driven by the rise of AI.
Job prospects for foreign language majors in China have been steadily declining. Spanish ranked at the bottom of the list in Hunan Province’s employment rate for recent graduates. The “Anhui Province University Majors and Employment Demand Analysis Report (2021)” listed Korean, Arabic, and English (translation) among the 20 majors with the lowest employment rates.
Foreign language graduates also had lower salaries. According to the “2023 China College Graduate Employment Report,” the average monthly wage of foreign language and literature graduates six months after graduation in 2022 was 5,547 yuan (778.14 USD), which is below the national average of 5,990 yuan (840.29 USD).
Caixin reported that with the rapid rise of the AI era, foreign language majors face an unprecedented challenge in adapting to society. Experts predict that the rapid development of AI will reduce the demand for foreign language professionals, with foreign language majors and translation work being hit the hardest.
In May, China’s state-run media CCTV reported that South Korea’s language programs had decreased by about 18% in the last five years, and admission quotas had also decreased by 18%.
Regarding AI’s impact, Dai Manchun from the Foreign Language Education Research Center at Beijing Foreign Studies University stated, “Universities are not competing with AI on speed, but on quality.” He emphasized that AI can only handle simple, everyday expressions; for more complex texts, machine translation must be followed by manual editing. Thus, translators must possess higher-level translation skills than AI.
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