Determining minimum number of edges to remove in a bipartite graph so the maximum path length is 2 I stumbled upon the following problem during my research.

I have a bipartite graph, and I want to determine the minimum number of edges to to remove so that the maximum path length in the resulting graph is 2. 

Is this problem NP-hard? I was trying to come up with a polynomial time algorithm (and failed) and also tried to prove its NP-hardness, but also having a hard time.
Figured out this is indeed NP-hard. This is equivalent to finding the maximum spanning star forest in a bipartite graph, which in turn is as hard as finding the minimum dominating set in a bipartite graph, which is NP-hard.