Over the past three years, the 'graduate entrance exam fever' has cooled significantly. This is not due to waning interest among young people in further education, but rather to how technological revolutions, industrial restructuring, and labor market transformations have altered the relationship between academic qualifications and competitiveness. In the AI era, the threshold for professional capabilities has redefined workplace value, with interdisciplinary integration skills becoming the 'hard currency' of industries. Academic degrees no longer automatically equate to professional competencies.

Currently, China is at a critical stage of the leapfrog transition of new-quality productive forces, with more precise requirements for the structure of high-level talents. Universities should make improving the quality of talent cultivation their core task, promote innovation in educational models, and ensure that educational supply resonates with technological changes and economic structural transformation. The cooling of the postgraduate exam fever reflects new expectations on the supply side of education. If universities still adhere to the logic of continuing education, they will miss the window of opportunity for transformation. In reality, the quality of some master's programs fails to support their training objectives. Universities should promote precise alignment between majors and industrial chain demands, integrate into new fields, and change training paths to provide students with substantial value-added. The cooling of the postgraduate exam fever is a natural decline in demand during the stage of insufficient supply-side reform. When students focus more on capabilities, enterprises emphasize competencies, and the country stresses deep integration, improving the quality of master's education becomes the theme of the times. If universities can seize the opportunity to drive comprehensive reforms in the training system, graduate education will become more competitive. To build a high-quality education system, education must serve national strategies, technological eras, and the development of young people's capabilities. The supply-side reform of education is a hard constraint.

Translated by Yiqian YANG

Full text in Chinese available at:

https://fddi.fudan.edu.cn/a1/26/c18965a762150/page.htm