American universities fall in global rankings

The University of Zhejiang, one of the most prestigious universities in China, nicknamed the “Cambridge of the East”, has just surpassed Harvard in the “Leiden Ranking”, an investigation that aims to measure the “scientific impact” of universities. This is a symptom of a worrying trend affecting the American academic world, according to The New York Times.

Harvard has fallen to third place in the ranking and the rising universities “are not its American counterparts, but Chinese universities that are steadily progressing in rankings that privilege the volume and quality of research papers,” the newspaper notes.

In addition to the University of Zhejiang, seven other Chinese institutions are in the top 10 of this ranking established by the Centre for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands, based in particular on the number of articles published by research teams in scientific journals.

A completely reversed situation compared to the early 2000s, highlighted by The New York Times as seven American universities were among the top ten at that time. And the University of Zhejiang, already at the top of Chinese universities, was only ranked 25th.

A “Relative” Decline

The problem does not stem from a decrease in scientific production in American universities, but from the spectacular development of research capacities in Chinese universities. “China is investing billions of dollars in its universities and making considerable efforts to make them attractive to foreign researchers,” which was not the case twenty years ago, explains the American newspaper.

In a speech he delivered in 2024, President Xi Jinping explicitly linked a nation’s global power to its dominance in scientific matters. “The scientific and technological revolution is intimately linked to the game of superpowers,” he declared. In the fall of 2025, China launched a new visa (the “K visa”) specifically for graduates from the world’s top universities in science and technology, allowing them to come to China to study or do business.

[Read more on Courrier International]