Until recently, Harvard was the most productive research university in the world, according to a global ranking that looks at academic publication.
That position may be teetering, the most recent evidence of a troubling trend for American academia.
Harvard recently dropped to No. 3 on the ranking. The schools racing up the list are not Harvard’s American peers, but Chinese universities that have been steadily climbing in rankings that emphasize the volume and quality of research they produce.
The reordering comes as the Trump administration has been slashing research funding to American schools that depend heavily on the federal government to pay for scientific endeavors. President Trump’s policies did not start the American universities’ relative decline, which began years ago, but they could accelerate it.
“There is a big shift coming, a bit of a new world order in global dominance of higher education and research,” said Phil Baty, chief global affairs officer for Times Higher Education, a British organization unconnected to The New York Times that produces one of the better-known world rankings of universities.
Educators and experts say the shift is a problem not just for American universities, but also for the nation as a whole.
“There is a risk of the trend continuing, and potential decline,” Mr. Baty said. “I use the word ‘decline’ very carefully. It’s not as if U.S. schools are getting demonstrably worse, it’s just the global competition: Other nations are making more rapid progress.”
Look back to the early 2000s, and a global university ranking based on scientific output, such as published journal articles, would be very different. Seven American schools would be among the top 10, led by Harvard University at No. 1.
Only one Chinese school, Zhejiang University, would even make the top 25.
Today, Zhejiang is ranked first on that list, the Leiden Rankings, from the Centre for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University in the Netherland. Seven other Chinese schools are in the top 10.
Harvard produces significantly more research now than it did two decades ago, but it has nonetheless fallen to third. And it is the only American university still near the top of the list. Harvard is still first in the Leiden rankings for highly-cited scientific publications.
The issue at top American universities is not falling production.
Six prominent American schools that would have been in the top 10 in the first decade of the 2000s — the University of Michigan, the University of California, Los Angeles, Johns Hopkins, the University of Washington-Seattle, the University of Pennsylvania, and Stanford University — are producing more research than they did two decades ago, according to the Leiden tallies.
But production by the Chinese schools has risen far more.
According to Mark Neijssel, director of services for the Centre for Science and Technology Studies, the Leiden rankings take into account papers and citations contained in the Web of Science, a database set of academic publications which is owned by Clarivate, a data and analytics company. Thousands of academic journals are represented in the databases, many of which are highly specialized, he said.
Global university rankings generally have not attracted much popular attention in the United States. Even so, some experienced academics are seeing the growth in research production from China that the rankings reflect, and are warning that America is falling behind.
Rafael Reif, a former president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said on a podcast last year that “the number of papers and the quality of the papers coming from China are outstanding” and are “dwarfing what we’re doing in the U.S.”
Institutions in other countries around the world, by contrast, are watching the global rankings, seeing them as a measure both of academic prowess and of their progress in overtaking the United States. Zhejiang University displays its rankings prominently on its web page, and lists among the milestones in its history when it broke into the top 100 globally in 2017. Chinese state media has celebrated the ranking rise of the country’s universities.
The center at Leiden has begun producing an alternative ranking that is based on a different academic database, called OpenAlex. Harvard is No. 1 in that ranking, but the trend is the same: 12 of the next 13 schools on the alternative list are Chinese.
“China is really building a lot of research capacity,” Mr. Neijssel said. At the same time, he said, Chinese researchers are putting more emphasis on publishing in English-language journals that are more widely read — and cited — around the world.
President Xi Jinping, in a speech in 2024, praised his country’s advances in fields such as quantum technology and space science. He cited a breakthrough by researchers at Tianjin Institute of Industrial Biotechnology, who developed a method to synthesize starch from carbon dioxide in the lab, which could possibly lead to industries making food from the air, without needing acres of plants dependent on land, irrigation and harvesting.
Other ranking systems that are weighted toward scientific output reflect a similar shift toward Chinese institutions.
Harvard is No. 1 globally in the University Ranking by Academic Performance, compiled by the Informatics Institute of Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey. But Stanford University was the only other U.S. school in the top 10, which includes four Chinese universities. Another ranking, the Nature Index, placed Harvard first, followed by 10 Chinese schools.
Harvard and other leading U.S. universities face a fresh set of stressors from the Trump administration’s cuts to science grants, as well as from travel bans and an anti-immigration crackdown that has swept up international students and academics.
The number of international students arriving in the U.S. in August 2025 was 19 percent lower than the year before, a trend that could further hurt the prestige and rankings of American schools if the world’s best minds choose to study and work elsewhere.
China has been pouring billions of dollars into its universities and aggressively working to make them attractive to foreign researchers. In the fall, China began offering a visa specifically for graduates of top universities in science and technology to travel to China to study or do business.
“China has a boatload of money in higher education that it didn’t have 20 years ago,” said Alex Usher, president of Higher Education Strategy Associates, a Toronto education consulting company.
Mr. Xi has made the reasons for the country’s investments explicit, arguing that a nation’s global power depends on its scientific dominance.
“The scientific and technological revolution is intertwined with the game between superpowers,” he said in a speech in 2024.
President Trump’s administration has taken the opposite tack, aiming to cut billions of dollars in research grants for U.S. universities.
Trump officials have argued that the cuts are meant to eliminate waste and reorient research away from themes of diversity and other topics that they see as too political.
The Trump administration did not respond to a request for comment for this article.
A White House spokeswoman, Liz Huston, has said in the past that “the best science can’t thrive in institutions that have abandoned merit, free inquiry, and the pursuit of truth.”
University leaders in the United States warned throughout 2025 that reductions in federal research grants could have devastating effects.
Harvard established a web page to catalog the types of scientific and medical research that would be interrupted by grant cuts. The American Association of University Professors and several legal allies filed suit to contest some of the cuts. The group’s president, Todd Wolfson, warned that research cuts would “stunt the development of the next generation of scientists.”
A federal judge has ordered the federal government to resume funding for Harvard, after the Trump administration cut off billions of dollars in research funds in the spring. The administration has said it would curtail future grants to the school.
A Harvard spokesman declined to comment.
The prestige and global standing of many other U.S. universities are also in jeopardy. Fewer and smaller federal grants means less research, and by extension, potentially fewer discoveries to be written up and published in academic articles and papers, which will affect how schools fare in future rankings.
Research universities make it part of their mission to pursue discoveries and develop new knowledge. Faculty members are often under pressure to produce results, summed up in the phrase “publish or perish.”
Schools that do not aspire to produce reams of academic research papers, such as many liberal arts colleges, would not figure on production-based rankings. Mr. Neijssel said the Leiden rankings “do not pretend to say anything” about the quality of teaching at a university.
Top U.S. schools have fared much better in ranking systems whose criteria are broader than just academic output. Some give weight to factors such as a school’s reputation, finances, and how badly students want to enroll, as reflected in its application acceptance rate. Some even take into account the number of Nobel Prize winners on the faculty.
These broader rankings may be slower to change, experts say, though they still show signs of the erosion of American supremacy in higher education.
For 2026, and for the 10th year in a row, Times Higher Education in Britain ranked Oxford University the No. 1 university in the world. The rest of the organization’s top five included the same schools as last year: M.I.T., Princeton, the University of Cambridge, and then Harvard, tied with Stanford.
American schools held seven of the top 10 spots in the 2026 ranking. But farther down the list, American universities are slipping. Sixty-two U.S. schools were ranked lower than last year, while only 19 rose.
Ten years ago, two prominent Beijing schools — Peking University and Tsinghua University — were ranked 42nd and 47th in Times Higher Education’s list. Now they are just below the top 10: Tsinghua was ranked 12th, and Peking 13th.
Six schools in Hong Kong are now in the top 200; South Korea placed four in the top 100.
While some foreign schools have risen, some well-known American schools have slipped. Duke University, for instance, was ranked 20th in 2021, and now is ranked 28th. Over that same time span, Emory University dropped to 102nd from 85th. Ten years ago, Notre Dame ranked 108th; now it is No. 194.
The pressures that could reduce Harvard’s research output, like federal grant reductions and cuts to the school’s Ph.D. programs, are unlikely to show up immediately in rankings, said Mr. Usher, the higher education consultant.
“If you’re looking at how many articles end up in ‘Nature’ or ‘Science’ from that institution, that is based on research that started four or five years ago,” he said. “There is a pretty serious time lag. I wouldn’t expect that to have a big impact in the next few years.”
While China is thriving in disciplines like chemistry and environmental sciences, the United States and Europe remain dominant in others, like general biology and medical sciences. And a study has suggested that Chinese researchers have been boosting their citation rankings by citing one another more often than western researchers tend to cite other westerners.
University rankings are an old phenomenon, dating back to the early 20th Century, according to Alan Ruby, senior fellow and director of global engagement at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania.
Students often use rankings to help them decide where to apply, and academics use them as guides to where to work and conduct research, he said. Some governments use them in doling out research money, and some employers see them as a tool for quickly sorting large numbers of entry-level job candidates.
“If you’re trying to attract the best talent in the world, be it students or researchers or faculty, you want to have that signaling power of, ‘We’re a highly ranked institution,’ ” Mr. Ruby said.
Beyond marketing, rankings matter because the quality of universities matter, according to Paul Musgrave, a professor of government at Georgetown University’s campus in Doha, Qatar. It can be difficult to draw a direct line between good universities and national power, he said, but “on the other hand, we all know that when the Germans wrecked their universities in the 1930s it probably hurt them in a lot of ways.”
Mark Arsenault covers higher education for The Times.
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