Until recently, Harvard was the most productive research university in the world, according to a global ranking that measures academic production based on scientific publications.
That position now appears under threat — and is the latest sign of a worrying trend for American academia.
Harvard recently dropped to 3rd place in the rankings. The institutions moving up the list are not traditional American rivals, but rather Chinese universities that have been steadily advancing in assessments that give weight to the volume and quality of research they produce.
This change comes amid the Trump administration’s cuts to research funding for American universities, which rely heavily on federal resources to fund scientific projects. President Donald Trump’s policies did not initiate the relative loss of space at US universities — this movement began years earlier — but they could accelerate it.
“A big change is coming, a kind of new world order in the global realm of higher education and research,” said Phil Baty, director of global affairs at Times Higher Education, a British organization with no ties to the The New York Times which produces one of the best-known university rankings in the world.
Educators and experts say this turn is not just a problem for American universities, but for the country as a whole.
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“There is a risk that the trend will continue, and a possible decline,” Baty said. “I use the word ‘slump’ very carefully. It’s not that U.S. institutions are getting noticeably worse, it’s global competition: other countries are advancing much faster.”
If we go back to the early 2000s, a global ranking of universities based on scientific production — such as articles published in academic journals — would have a very different picture. Seven American institutions would be in the top 10, with Harvard in 1st place.
Only one Chinese university, Zhejiang University, would appear in the top 25.
Today, Zhejiang is in 1st place on that same list, the Leiden Ranking, prepared by the Center for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University, in the Netherlands. Another seven Chinese institutions are in the top 10.
Harvard produces much more research today than it did two decades ago, but it still fell to 3rd place. And it is the only American university that still ranks near the top. The institution remains in 1st place in the Leiden Ranking, which only considers highly cited scientific publications.
The problem with large American universities is not the drop in production.
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Six prominent U.S. institutions — which would have been in the top 10 in the first decade of the 2000s — are producing more research today than they did 20 years ago, according to Leiden’s data: University of Michigan, UCLA, Johns Hopkins, University of Washington (Seattle), University of Pennsylvania and Stanford.
But the volume produced by Chinese universities grew much more.
According to Mark Neijssel, director of services at the Center for Science and Technology Studies, the Leiden Ranking takes into account articles and citations indexed in Web of Science, a set of databases of academic publications from the Clarivate company, data and analysis. Thousands of scientific journals are included in these databases, many of them highly specialized, he said.
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In the US, global university rankings generally do not attract as much public attention. Even so, experienced academics have noticed the growth in Chinese scientific production reflected in these lists — and warn that the United States is falling behind.
Rafael Reif, former president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), said in a podcast last year that “the number of articles and the quality of articles coming out of China is impressive” and is “overshadowing what we are doing in the US.”
Institutions from other countries closely monitor global rankings, seeing them as a thermometer of both academic weight and progress in relation to the United States. Zhejiang University displays its rankings prominently on its official website and cites entering the global top 100 in 2017 as a milestone in its history. Chinese state media has also been celebrating the rise of the country’s universities in these indicators.
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The Leiden center also started to produce an alternative ranking, based on another academic database, called OpenAlex. In this survey, Harvard appears in 1st place, but the trend is the same: 12 of the next 13 institutions are Chinese.
“China is really building a lot of research capacity,” Neijssel said. At the same time, he added, Chinese researchers have been placing more emphasis on publishing in English-language journals, which are most read — and cited — around the world.
In a speech in 2024, President Xi Jinping praised Chinese advances in areas such as quantum technology and space sciences. He highlighted, for example, an advance by researchers at the Tianjin Institute of Industrial Biotechnology, who developed a method to synthesize starch from carbon dioxide in the laboratory — something that could, in theory, pave the way for industries to “produce food from the air”, without depending on large areas of planting, irrigation and harvesting.
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Other ranking systems that give greater weight to scientific production also show a shift towards Chinese institutions.
Harvard is No. 1 globally in the University Ranking by Academic Performance, prepared by the Middle East Technical University Informatics Institute in Ankara, Türkiye. But Stanford is the only other American university in the top 10, which features four Chinese institutions. Another ranking, the Nature Index, places Harvard in 1st, followed by 10 universities in China.
Harvard and other large American universities are still facing a new round of pressure, partly due to the Trump administration’s cuts in scholarships and research subsidies, partly due to travel restrictions and the tightening of immigration policy, which affect international students and academics.
The number of foreign students arriving in the US in August 2025 was 19% lower than the previous year — a trend that could further damage the US’s prestige and position in rankings if some of the world’s best talent choose to study and work in other countries.
China, in turn, has been pouring billions of dollars into its universities and moving aggressively to make them more attractive to foreign researchers. In the second semester, the country started to offer a specific type of visa to graduates from top science and technology universities, allowing them to travel to China to study or do business.
“China now has a huge amount of money in higher education that it didn’t have 20 years ago,” said Alex Usher, president of Toronto-based consultancy Higher Education Strategy Associates.
Xi makes the reasons for so much investment clear, arguing that a country’s global power depends on its scientific dominance.
“The scientific and technological revolution is intertwined with the game between superpowers”, he stated in a speech in 2024.
The Trump administration is taking the opposite path, trying to cut billions of dollars in research resources for American universities.
Trump administration officials argue that the cuts are aimed at eliminating waste and redirecting research away from topics like diversity and other subjects they consider “politicized.”
The Trump administration did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
In previous statements, White House spokeswoman Liz Huston stated that “the best science cannot thrive in institutions that have abandoned merit, free inquiry and the search for truth.”
University leaders in the United States warned throughout 2025 that the reduction in federal funding for research could have devastating effects.
Harvard created a specific page to list the types of scientific and medical research that would be interrupted by the cuts. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and legal allies went to court against part of the measures. The entity’s president, Todd Wolfson, warned that the cuts will “delay the development of the next generation of scientists”.
A federal judge has ordered the government to resume funding Harvard after the Trump administration cut billions of dollars in research funding in the spring. The government, however, has already warned that it intends to restrict future concessions to the university.
A Harvard spokesperson declined to comment.
The prestige and global standing of many other American universities are also at risk. Less federal funds and grants mean less research — and, consequently, possibly fewer discoveries to be published in articles and academic papers, which directly impacts performance in future rankings.
While China excels in areas such as chemistry and environmental sciences, the United States and Europe remain dominant in fields such as general biology and medical sciences. And one study suggests that Chinese researchers have boosted their citation rates by citing each other more often than Western researchers cite their Western counterparts.
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Leiden Ranking
A list from the Center for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands lists eight Chinese universities in the top 10:
- Zhejiang University, China
- Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China
- Harvard University, United States
- Sichuan University, China
- Central South University, China
- Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China
- Sun Yat-sen University, China
- Xi’an Jiaotong University, China
- Tsinghua University, China
- University of Toronto, Canada
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