America’s top colleges are in an accelerating slide down the list of global rankings amid President Donald Trump’s relentless attacks on higher education.
Harvard University continues to rank number one for academic performance. Stanford University, however, is now the only other U.S. college to place on a top-ten list that otherwise includes four Chinese universities, the New York Times writes, citing ratings compiled by the Middle East Technical University in Turkey.
A similar list maintained by Leiden University in the Netherlands ranks Harvard at the top, with 12 of the following 13 colleges based in China. More than 60 U.S. colleges also fell on the UK Times Higher Education List, with well-known institutions suffering significant downgrades, such as an eight- and 17-place drop for Duke University and Emory University, respectively.
“President Trump’s policies did not start the American universities’ relative decline,” the NYT writes, outlining trends that go back to the early 2000s. “But they could accelerate it.”
The newspaper highlights how the MAGA administration has aimed to cut billions in funding for research grants with the goal of discouraging work on areas, like critical race theory, that the White House sees as ideologically hostile to its broader agenda.
As part of Trump’s attack on academic institutions, his administration waged legal war against top universities, resulting in massive payouts.
In November 2025, Cornell University agreed to pay the Trump adminstration $60 million and alter its DEI policies. The payout was ordered split between a $30 million payment to the government and a $30 million investment into research supporting farmers. Brown University and Columbia University both reached similar deals with the administration, with Columbia paying $200 million and Brown paying $50 million.
Travel bans and a nationwide deportation drive have also discouraged applications from the best and brightest abroad, with international enrollment reportedly dropping by 19 percent in the twelve months prior to August 2025.
In May 2025, 79-year-old Trump posted on Truth Social, demanding to know enrollment information about Harvard’s international students. His administration also attempted to revoke the university’s ability to enroll international students that same month, though the effort was blocked by a federal judge.
China’s comparative rise in turn owes to having adopted precisely the opposite strategy, allocating billions in funding to universities and aggressively promoting its higher education institutions to foreign academics to attract further talent from overseas.
The NYT’s reporting comes as a recent poll found that most people in 21 different countries feel Trump’s increasingly aggressive foreign policy is only serving to further assert China’s dominance on the world stage.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment on this story.
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