For decades, global university rankings told a predictable story: American institutions dominated, with Harvard, Stanford and MIT as immutable peaks. That story is changing.
In the latest Leiden Rankings, which measure research output, Harvard has slipped to third place behind two Chinese universities. On the Shanghai Ranking, China and Taiwan together now place more universities in the top 500 than the United States does.
For those inclined to view international affairs through the lens of competition, the narrative writes itself: American decline, Chinese ascent. But this framing—seductive as it may be—obscures more than it reveals.
University rankings measure specific, quantifiable outputs: the volume of publications, citation counts, Nobel laureates on faculty and articles in journals like “Nature and Science.”
What they do not measure is the breadth of a university’s mission — the quality of undergraduate teaching, civic engagement, the nurturing of critical thinking or the incubation of startups that never publish a paper but transform industries.
Zhejiang University has surged to number one on the Leiden Rankings not because Harvard has faltered, but because Chinese institutions have dramatically expanded their research capacity.
Harvard actually produces more research today than it did two decades ago; six other major US universities — Michigan, UCLA, Johns Hopkins, Penn, Stanford and Washington — have similarly increased their output.
The issue is not American regression; it is that others are advancing faster. This distinction matters enormously. A runner who improves their personal best but loses the race to someone who improved more is not declining — they are simply no longer winning by the same margin. Whether this constitutes a crisis depends entirely on whether winning the race was ever the point.
China’s rise in rankings reflects deliberate, sustained investment over decades. The government has poured billions into building research universities and has explicitly tied scientific strength to national power. Asian institutions are also enormous, enabling greater aggregate scientific output and more highly cited researchers.
Meanwhile, funding uncertainty in the US creates real headwinds. Multiple major American universities have faced funding freezes or cuts running into hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars.
If sustained, such reductions will eventually manifest in reduced research capacity — though with a time lag of four to five years, as current publications reflect research begun long before current funding disruptions.
Yet here lies an uncomfortable truth for all sides: funding is necessary but not sufficient. Money alone does not produce intellectual breakthroughs—it enables the conditions in which they become more likely.
The Soviet Union invested heavily in science and achieved remarkable feats, but its universities never became global magnets for talent. What distinguishes the most generative research environments is not merely resources, but academic freedom, intellectual diversity and the unpredictable cross-pollination of ideas.
The most thoughtful observers note that rankings serve particular audiences for particular purposes. Students use them to decide where to apply; governments use them to allocate research funding; employers use them as crude filters for job candidates. None of these uses require rankings to capture the full complexity of what universities do.
China’s universities excel in chemistry and environmental sciences; the United States and Europe remain dominant in biology and medical sciences. The picture is not one of wholesale replacement but of differentiated strengths.
And notably, some research has suggested that Chinese researchers may be boosting citation counts through internal citation networks more than Western researchers do — a reminder that metrics can be gamed, and that all measures become targets.
The most important question is not who is “winning” on any particular ranking, but whether humanity’s collective capacity to generate knowledge is expanding. On this measure, the picture is unambiguously positive: more universities in more countries are producing more research than ever before.
Rather than treating rankings as a geopolitical scorecard, policymakers and educators might ask different questions entirely. Are our universities fulfilling their social missions — not just producing papers, but preparing citizens, advancing equity and solving pressing problems?
Are we creating conditions for the free exchange of ideas across borders, or are we building walls that impoverish everyone? Are we measuring what matters, or simply what is measurable?
The pattern is not American regression — other nations are simply advancing faster. This is not decline; it is diffusion. And in a world where knowledge creation is increasingly essential to addressing shared challenges like climate change, pandemic preparedness and sustainable development, broader participation in the research enterprise should be welcomed, not feared.
The real risk is not that Chinese universities will outpace American ones on citation metrics. It is that both countries — and others — will become so consumed with competitive rankings that they forget what universities are actually for.
Y. Tony Yang is an endowed professor at the George Washington University in Washington, DC.