Our phrase of the week is: “pitfall majors” (天坑专业 tiān kēng zhuān yè)
Context
The Communication University of China (中国传媒大学) says it’s discontinuing 16 of its undergraduate degrees.
According to the university’s party secretary, Liao Xiangzhong (廖祥忠), traditional subjects like translation, photography, visual communication design, arts management, and comics are to be axed.
The story exploded on social media. An open letter written by some students at the university was shared tens of thousands of times online. In the letter they asked:
“Will our diplomas still be recognised? What will happen to our remaining classes?”
毕业找工作，用人单位看到我们专业没了，会不会觉得我们是“被淘汰的人”？
Communication University responded, saying it’s not just cancelling these 16 subjects; it’s adapting what it teaches to fit changes in technology and the world of work. So the axed subjects will be merged into other degrees.
But that’s little consolation for students currently in those degrees, or those considering them in the near future:
“It’s foreseeable that in the next round of university curriculum reforms, majors that are overly technical or too narrow in scope risk becoming the new ‘pitfall majors.’”
可以想见，在新一轮的高校专业改革中，那些过于工具化，过于单一的专业，恐怕就会成为新的”天坑专业。”
And with that, we have our Phrase of the Week.
What it means
“Pitfall major” is a four-character phrase which translates directly as “sky pit” (天坑), “specialised field” (专业).
In British English, we would translate it as “dead-end degree” — a university degree that leads to low pay, harsh working conditions, or poor job prospects.
In Chinese, “sky pit” (天坑) means sinkhole. China has some of the world’s most dramatic sinkholes, particularly in Chongqing and Guangxi, where the earth drops away into vast, seemingly bottomless caverns.
The character “pit” (坑) is also Chinese slang for “deceiving” someone or “getting them into trouble”. So in this context, the phrase “sky pit”, or “pitfall”, carries both of these meanings.
The phrase “pitfall major” (天坑专业) first gained traction on Chinese internet forums in the early 2010s, where students began ranking degrees by how bad their career prospects were.
The original big three “pitfall majors” were biology (生物), chemistry (化学), and environmental science (环境科学), fields that require years of postgraduate study but offer limited job opportunities. Education influencer Zhang Xuefeng (张雪峰) later expanded this to four, declaring that materials science (材料科学) belonged in the same category. These big four became known by the shorthand expression “生化环材”.
Graduates of these subjects find themselves in a cycle of low pay and limited job prospects. They spend their entire careers “climbing out of the pit” (爬坑), a phrase describing someone trying to make the best of a bad academic choice.
As China’s job market became increasingly competitive and “involuted” (内卷) — a term we’ve covered before — the number of degrees defined as “pitfall majors” expanded beyond the sciences, to law, philosophy, history and beyond.
Now, with AI beginning to reshape the world of work, the axing of traditionally popular arts degrees by Communication University is a sign of how far the “pitfall major” label has travelled.
Andrew Methven is the author of RealTime Mandarin, a resource which helps you bridge the gap to real-world fluency in Mandarin, stay informed about China, and communicate with confidence—all through weekly immersion in real news. Subscribe for free here.
AS someone who taught anthropology for over 40 years, I can understand that at one level (employers not seeing that graduates had any job-ready skills), but interestingly, about 20 years ago the Taiwan government decided that it had enough STEM graduates and needed more emphasis on the humanities and social sciences