By Abubakar M. Kareto
I recently watched a short, strikingly straightforward video produced by Vulcan Post featuring media executive Jacky Yap. The visual analysis detailed how China’s universities have quietly executed a massive, state-directed purge of their academic programs over the past five years. Beijing systematically revoked or suspended more than 12,200 undergraduate degree programs nationwide between 2021 and 2025, wiping out over 30 percent of its total university offerings.
The report caught my attention immediately, not merely because of the sheer scale of the intervention, but because of what it reveals about state foresight. China evaluates its degrees against real-world employment outcomes, shuts down underperforming programs after two consecutive warning years, and replaces them with 10,000 new majors focused on artificial intelligence, semiconductor manufacturing, and embodied intelligence. It is a masterclass in treating higher education as a national strategic supply chain.
What makes this shift deeply unsettling for an analyst watching from the Global South is the glaring contrast it draws with our own reality in Nigeria. While global economic powerhouses actively phase out traditional arts, foreign languages, and administrative management courses because routine tasks in these fields are rapidly taken over by artificial intelligence, Nigerian institutions do the exact opposite. We proudly accredit and launch programs that the modern international labor market actively discards.
Our academic institutions continue to operate in a policy vacuum, mistaking institutional expansion for progress while churning out thousands of graduates tailored for an economic epoch that has already closed. This structural disconnect becomes even more alarming when evaluated alongside Nigeria’s labor market realities. Over 600,000 graduates join our domestic labor force annually, yet according to data from the National Bureau of Statistics, over 92 percent of total employment in Nigeria remains trapped in the informal sector.
Furthermore, recent youth workforce studies indicate that up to 96 percent of employed young adults are forced into informal, precarious work simply because the formal economy lacks the structural capacity and the modern technical ecosystem to absorb them. We run an educational treadmill that consumes vast public and family resources only to deliver certified young adults directly into long-term economic precariousness. This gap highlights a deeper geopolitical risk regarding the rapid divergence in global human capital competitiveness.
Countries like China deliberately tailor their populations to capture high-value technology industries, building the workforce that will design humanoid robotics, manage automated logistics, and power advanced silicon chip fabrication lines. Nigeria, meanwhile, risks becoming a passive consumer of these technological breakthroughs rather than a co-creator. By failing to integrate machine learning, advanced data analytics, robotics, or microelectronics into the core of our tertiary ecosystem, we effectively surrender our place in the global digital economy before the race has even fully begun.
This profound divergence in policy foresight poses an existential threat to Nigeria’s long-term national development. With over 60 percent of our population under the age of 25, failing to align higher education with Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies actively accelerates a catastrophic structural skills mismatch. We systematically produce a generation whose qualifications possess diminishing currency in an increasingly automated global market. If Nigerian policymakers, university regulators, and academic leadership do not urgently abandon reactive governance, embrace industrial realism, and begin aggressively restructuring our university curricula around the frontier technologies of tomorrow, we risk condemning millions of our youth to permanent economic irrelevance.
About the Author
Abubakar M. Kareto is a public affairs analyst and strategic communications specialist. He focuses on governance, socio-political dynamics, and public policy analysis across Nigeria and Africa. He can be reached via email at amkareto@gmail.com or on X (formerly Twitter) @amkareto.
