Why civil engineering students are disappearing from China’s top universities

After a prolonged building boom, the number of people pursuing the degrees in China is dwindling

Reading Time:6 minutes

Why you can trust SCMP

As China’s decades-long property boom wanes, university students are abandoning civil engineering disciplines. Photo: AFP

Dannie Pengin Beijing

Published: 5:00pm, 7 Oct 2024

Tongji University in Shanghai used to be the promised land for Chinese students looking to become civil engineers.

Its civil engineering programme was ranked number one in the world from 2017 to 2021 by the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU).

Its reputation grew over the decades, as rapid, infrastructure-fuelled economic growth in China caused a huge demand for people in the construction industry. Civil engineering became a desirable career and universities scrambled to meet the demand for courses.

But now, that rapid growth has begun to wane, and China’s housing and infrastructure sector has slowed, shrinking hiring demand and earnings, and dimming interest among students for related degrees.

At Tongji, the college of civil engineering has cut its undergraduate numbers for the past four or five years, according to a faculty member who spoke on condition of anonymity.

He said that, while previously the Tongji programme was at the top of the list for high-achieving students applying to change majors, in recent years the opposite had become the case, with more applications to transfer out than in.

It is a similar story at Hunan University, in central China. Of the 440 students there who applied to change majors in 2022, nearly 100 came from the college of civil engineering – the highest number of any college – and none applied to move into the department.