There has been a lot of talk recently about the crisis or crises of American universities. Certainly, if we look at the deteriorating
financial situation, the thuggish behavior of demonstrators at Ivy League schools or big state universities,
scandals about admissions, or fraudulent research then, yes, American universities
do seem to be in a very bad way.
However, financial problems, violent extremism, corruption, and research fraud can be found almost everywhere. Is there a way to compare large numbers of
institutions across international frontiers? There is no perfect mode of assessment,
but global rankings can tell us quite a bit about the health or sickness of
higher education and research.
When Americans think about university rankings, it is usually America’s Best Colleges published for more than four decades by US News (USN) that comes to mind. In the rest of the world, global rankings are more
significant. The leader in public approval, if we mean governments, university leaders, and the media, is clearly the Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings. These rankings are characterised by bizarrely implausible
results, sometimes dismissed as outliers or quirky statistics. In the last few years
– sorry to keep repeating this -- we have seen Anglia Ruskin University and Babol
Noshirvani University of Technology leading the world for research impact,
Macau University of Science and Technology and the University of Macau
superstars for internationalisation, Anadolu University and Makerere University
in the global top ten for knowledge transfer. No matter, as long as the
composite top fifty scores look reasonable from a traditional perspective and
the usual heroes, Harvard, MIT, Oxford, are at the top or not too far away.
QS, another British company, was once THE’s data supplier but has pursued an independent path since 2010. Its rankings are more sensible than THE's, but it also seems to have an undue regard for the old Western
elite. In its recent world subject rankings, Harvard was first in the world for
all five broad subjects except Engineering and Technology, where the crown
went to MIT, and Oxford was second in all but one.
These two, along with the Shanghai Rankings by virtue of
their age, and occasionally the US News Best Global Universities,
because of the fame of their national rankings, constitute the NBA of the
ranking world. They are cited endlessly by the global media and provide lists
for the appointment of external examiners and editorial boards and for
recruitment, promotion, and admissions and even data for the immigration
policies of the UK, Hong Kong, and the Netherlands.
However, there are other rankings based on publicly accessible data, transparent methodologies, and consistent procedures. They are largely ignored by those with power and influence, but they tell a coherent and factual story. They are published by universities or research centers with limited budgets and small but well-qualified research
teams.
I will take three: Leiden Ranking, produced by the Centre for
Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) at Leiden University, the Netherlands, University
Ranking by Academic Performance (URAP) by the Informatics Institute at the Middle
East Technical University in Ankara, and the SCImago Institutions Rankings (SIR)
published by the SCImago Lab in Spain, which has links with the Spanish
National Research Council and Spanish universities.
Leiden Ranking
Let’s start by taking a look at Leiden Ranking. The
publishers decline to construct any composite or combined ranking, which limits its popular appeal. The default metric,
which appears when you land on the list page, is just the number of articles
and reviews in core journals in the Web of Science database. Back in 2006-2009, Harvard was in first place here, and other US universities filled up the upper
levels of the ranking. The University of Michigan was third, and the University
of California Los Angeles (UCLA) was fifth. Chinese universities were lagging
behind. Zhejiang University in Hangzhou was 16th, and Tsinghua
University in Beijing 32nd.
Fast forward to publications between 2019 and 2022, and
Zhejiang has overtaken Harvard and pushed it into second place. The top twenty
now includes several Chinese universities, some now world-famous, but others, such as Central South University or Jilin University, scarcely known in the
West.
Much of this decline is due to China's advance at the expense of US schools, but that is not the whole story. UCLA has now fallen
behind Toronto, São Paulo, Seoul National University, Oxford, University College
London, Melbourne, Tokyo, and Copenhagen.
You could say that is just quantity, not quality, and maybe we should be looking at high-impact publications. In that case, we should look at
publications in the top 10% of journals, where Zhejiang is still ahead of Harvard.
It is only when we reach the top 1% of journals that Harvard still has a lead,
and one wonders how long that will last.
That is just the number of publications. Academics tend to
judge scientific quality by the number of citations that a work receives.
Leiden Ranking no longer ranks universities by citations, perhaps with good
reason, but does provide data in the individual profiles. Here we see Harvard’s
citations per paper score rising from 13.31 in 2006-2009 to 15.71 in 2019-2022, while Zhejiang’s rises from 3.38 to 11.43. So, Harvard is still ahead for citations,
but the gap is closing rapidly and will probably be gone in three or four years.
URAP
Turning to the URAP, which is based on a bundle of research
metrics, Harvard was first in the combined rankings back in 2013-2014, and the best-performing Chinese institution was Peking University, in 51st place. Now, in the recently published 2024-2025 rankings, Harvard is still first, but Peking is now tenth, and Zhejiang and Tsinghua have also entered the top
ten.
Other elite American universities have fallen: Berkeley from
5th to 54th, Yale from 18th to 38th,
Boston University from 58th to 151st, Dartmouth from 333rd
to 481st.
The relative and absolute decline of the American elite is
even clearer if we look at certain key areas. In the ranking for Information
and Computing Sciences, the top ten are all located in Mainland China and
Singapore, with Tsinghua at the top. Harvard is 35th.
Some American universities are doing
much better here than Harvard. MIT, which I suppose will soon be known as the
Tsinghua of the West, is 12th, and Carnegie Mellon is 15th.
In Engineering the top 25 universities are all located in
Mainland China, Hong Kong, or Singapore. The best American school is again MIT
in 37th place, while Harvard languishes in 71st.
SCImago
These rankings are quite distinctive in that they have a
section for Innovation, which comprises metrics related to patents, and for
Societal Factors, which is a mixed bag containing data about altmetrics,
gender, impact on policy, web presence, and the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
It also includes non-university organisations such as hospitals, companies,
non-profits, and government agencies.
When these rankings started in 2009, and before societal factors were included, Harvard was in second place after France's National Scientific Research Center (CNRS). MIT and UCLA were both in the top ten, and the best-performing Chinese university was Tsinghua, in 80th place, while Zhejiang and Peking lagged way behind at 124th and 176th, respectively.
In the latest 2025 rankings, Harvard has slipped to fourth
place behind the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Chinese Ministry of
Education, and CNRS. Tsinghua, Zhejiang, and Peking are all in the top twenty, and MIT, UCLA, and the North Carolina schools have all fallen.
Looking at Computer Science, the world leader is the Chinese
Academy of Sciences. The best university is Tsinghua, in fourth place. Then
there are some multinational and American companies and more Chinese
universities before arriving at Stanford in the 24th slot. Harvard
is 64th.
In the next post, we will look at the causes of all this.
