University World News Article

 

UNITED KINGDOM

Oxbridge’s ranking slip: The real ‘villain’ is methodology

Richard Holmes  24 September 2025

Oxbridge’s ranking slip: The real ‘villain’ is methodology

Republication of Substack Post

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Published in Substack

India and the Rankings

Richard Holmes

Apr 14, 2025

The Decline of Harvard

 

Published in Substack 08 April 2025

Quite a few stories have come out of the Ivy League about how standards are collapsing. I used to think that this was just the perennial lament of teachers everywhere that today’s students are inferior to those of my day. But the stories are coming faster these days, and they seem to be consonant with declining cognitive skills throughout the West, a general disengagement by students, increasing rates of plagiarism, rejection of science and liberal values, and the ardent embrace of extremist ideologies.

Perhaps the most striking story was when Harvard introduced remedial math courses for some of its students. This resulted from the suspension of requiring the submission of SAT and ACT scores following the COVID-19 outbreak.

I suspect that the problem may go deeper than that, and remedial courses at Harvard and other elite schools may become permanent, although probably presented as enrichment programs or something like that.

But this is all anecdotal. Evidence from global rankings can provide more systematic data, which shows that Harvard is steadily declining relative to international universities and even to its peers in the USA.

Here is a prediction. This year, next year, or maybe the year after, Harvard will cede its position as the top university in the world in the publications metric in the Shanghai Rankings to Zhejiang University in Hangzhou.

The Shanghai Rankings, officially known as the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), have six indicators: Nobel prizes and Fields Medals for alumni, and faculty, papers in Nature and Science, Highly Cited Researchers, publications in the Science Citation Index Extended and the Social Science Citation Index, and Productivity per Capita, which is the sum of those five scores divided by the number of faculty.

When they began, the Shanghai Rankings placed Harvard in first place overall and for all the indicators except for productivity, where Caltech has always held the lead. However, in 2022, Harvard lost its lead to Princeton for faculty winning the Nobel and Fields awards. The coming loss of supremacy for publications will mean that Harvard will lead in just half of the six indicators.

This is only one sign of Harvard’s decline. Looking at some other rankings, we find a similar story. Back in 2010, when QS started producing independent rankings, Harvard was replaced by Cambridge, which in turn was superseded by MIT, which has held first place ever since. In the THE rankings, Caltech deposed Harvard in 2013 and was overtaken by Oxford in 2017.

I have no great faith in THE or QS, but this is suggestive. Then, we have the more rigorous research-based rankings. In the 2024 Leiden Ranking, published by the Centre for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University, Zhejiang University took over first place from Harvard for publications, although not – not yet anyway – for publications in the top 10% or 1% of journals. In the SCImago Institutions Ranking, published in Spain, Harvard is now fourth overall, although still the leading university.

But when we look at computer science and engineering rankings, it is clear that Harvard has fallen dramatically in areas crucial to economic growth and scientific research over the last few decades.

Shanghai has Harvard in 10th place for computer science, the National Taiwan University Rankings put it in 11^th behind Wisconsin, Georgia Institute of Technology, Texas at Austin, and Carnegie Mellon, SCImago Institutions Rankings 61^st, and University Ranking by Academic Performance, published by the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, 35^th.

For engineering, the prospect is just as grim. The Taiwan rankings have Harvard 31^st, Scimago 42^nd, and URAP 71^st.

Fine, you might say, but the bottom line is jobs and salaries. Let’s look at the latest Financial Times MBA rankings, where Harvard has plunged to 13^th place. A major reason for that was that nearly a quarter of the class of 2024 could not find jobs after graduating. According to Poets & Quants, Harvard’s “placement numbers are below every M7 peer, including Stanford, Wharton, Columbia, Kellogg, and Booth, with only one exception: MIT Sloan which is equal to HBS.”

It seems that Harvard’s problems are entrenched and pervasive. They may have been exacerbated by the pandemic, but their roots go back and go deeper. So what is the cause of this decline? I doubt that the usual villain, underfunding by vicious governments or offended donors, has anything to do with it. However, the announced Trumpian cuts may have an effect in the future.

A plausible hypothesis is that Harvard has drifted away from meritocracy in student admissions and assessment and, more significantly, faculty appointments and promotion.

Perhaps the concept of Harvard’s meritocracy has always been overblown. A few years ago, I was researching early American history and came across a reference to a prominent Massachusetts landowner who had graduated first in his class at Harvard. I was baffled because I thought I should have heard of somebody that brilliant. But it turned out that Harvard before the Revolution ranked students according to their perceived social status, a practice that ended with Independence, after which they were ranked alphabetically. The idea of sorting students academically seems to have become widespread only in the twentieth century.

Even after Harvard supposedly embraced meritocracy by introducing the SAT, the GRE, and other tests and linking tenure to publications and citations, it still included large numbers of legacies, athletes, persons of interest to the dean, and affirmative action.

It seems that Harvard is returning to its earlier model of subordinating academic performance to character, athletic ability, conformism, and membership of favored groups. It has appointed a president who is almost certainly the only Harvard professor in the humanities and social sciences not to have written a book. It has admitted students who are incapable or unwilling to do the academic work that elite universities used to require. And its global reputation is slowly eroding.

Substack

 I will be sending posts over to Substack. Here is the link to the Substack version of the previous post.

The Decline of American Universities: The View From Leiden, Ankara and Madrid

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 16^th, and Tsinghua University in Beijing 32^nd.

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 5^th to 54^th, Yale from 18^th to 38^th, Boston University from 58^th to 151^st, Dartmouth from 333^rd to 481^st.

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 35^th.

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 12^th, and Carnegie Mellon is 15^th.

In Engineering the top 25 universities are all located in Mainland China, Hong Kong, or Singapore. The best American school is again MIT in 37^th place, while Harvard languishes in 71^st.

 

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 24^th slot. Harvard is 64^th. 

In the next post, we will look at the causes of all this.

Blockchain Research Ranking

Blockchain, we are told, is poised to reshape global finance. That may be premature but it is beginning to look as though it will have a significant impact. Recent announcements by China and the United States indicate that blockchain technology will become an important part of international and national financial systems over the next few years.

In 2023 CoinDesk published a ranking of the best international universities for blockchain. The indicators were Scholarly Impact, Campus Blockchain Offerings, Employment and Industry Outcomes, and Academic Reputation. The rankings were led by Hong Kong Polytechnic University followed by the National University of Singapore and the University of Zurich. If we look at the research, the top three are Sun Yat-sen University, Nanyang Technological University, and Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

Since there has been no new edition of the CoinDesk ranking, the following ranking has been compiled. It consists only of publications in Scopus and Web of Science between 2020 and 2024. Universities have been ranked according to the number of publications in Scopus indexed journals.

Non-academic institutions and departments and colleges that are not linked to an institution have been excluded. Academic institutions with 100 or more publications in Scopus between 2020 and 2024 are included.

The current ranking shows that Mainland China is clearly the leader for blockchain research and that India, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Saudi Arabia have also performed well. Of the top ten universities for Scopus publications, seven are located in Mainland China, one in Hong Kong, one in India, and one in Saudi Arabia. The best American university is the University of Texas at San Antonio, which is in 59^th place.

 

  

Scopus rank	Institution	Country	Scopus Affiliation 2020-2024	WOS 2020-2024 affiliation
1	Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications	China	731	45
2	Chinese Academy of Sciences	China	594	66
3	University of Electronic Science and Technology of China	China	490	43
4	Xidian University	China	458	46
5	SRM Institute of Science and Technology	India	359	20
6	The Hong Kong Polytechnic University	Hong Kong	350	38
7	Beijing Institute of Technology	China	331	33
8	Beihang University	China	329	19
9	King Saud University	KSA	319	54
10	Tsinghua University	China	315	21
11	University of Chinese Academy of Sciences	China	313	23
12	Vellore Institute of Technology	India	309	48
13	Amity University	India	305	--
14	Sun Yat-Sen University	China	300	20
15	Southeast University	China	290	30
16	Shanghai Jiao Tong University	China	287	35
17	Nanyang Technological University	Singapore	279	40
18	Zhejiang University	China	277	24
19	Lovely Professional University	India	276	14
20	Wuhan University	China	270	24
21=	Beijing Jiaotong University	China	262	19
21=	Chandigarh University	India	262	--
23	Beijing University of Technology	China	247	16
24	Chitkara University, Punjab	India	242	--
25	Guangzhou University	China	241	18
26	Graphic Era Deemed to be University	India	234	--
27	Huazhong University of Science and Technology	China	223	24
28	K L Deemed to be University	India	220	--
29	Nanjing University of Post and Telecommunications	China	216	19
30=	King Abdulaziz University	KSA	211	33
30=	Nirma University, Institute of Technology	India	211	38
32	Peking University	China	210	--
33	Nirma University	India	206	38
34=	Shenzhen University	China	205	29
34=	University of Petroleum and Energy Studies	India	205	35
36	UNSW Sydney	Australia	200	42
37	Khalifa University of Science and Technology	UAE	195	19
38	University of Technology Sydney	Australia	193	35
39	Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications	China	192	27
40	Qatar University	Qatar	190	24
41	Northeastern University	China	189	15
42	Symbiosis International (Deemed University)	India	188	17
43	Guilin University of Electronic Technology	China	186	13
44	Deakin University	Australia	184	37
45	Thapar Institute of Engineering Technology	India	181	27
46	Hainan University	China	179	10
47	Xi'an Jiaotong University	China	177	25
48	COMSATS University Islamabad	Pakistan	176	23
49	City University of Hong Kong	Hong Kong	175	18
50	Tianjin University	China	174	13
51	National University of Defense Technology China	China	173	--
52	Institute of Information Engineering	India	170	--
53	Guangdong University of Technology	China	166	23
54	Uttaranchal University	India	163	--
55	Shandong University	China	162	--
56	Nanjing University of Information Science Technology	China	161	34
57	Galgotias University	India	160	--
58	Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics	China	159	24
59	The University of Texas at San Antonio	USA	157	27
60	Saveetha Institute of Medical and Technical Sciences	India	156	--
61=	Norges Teknisk-Naturvitenskapelige Universitet	Norway	153	--
61=	Bina Nusantara University	Indonesia	153	--
63	University College London	UK	151	27
64	East China Normal University	China	150	--
65	RMIT University	Australia	149	24
66=	Qilu University of Technology	China	148	10
66=	Harbin Institute of Technology	China	148	14
68	Hunan University	China	145	--
69=	Nanjing University	China	143	--
69=	Saveetha School of Engineering	India	143	--
71	The University of Sydney	Australia	141	16
72=	Old Dominion University	USA	138	17
72=	Fudan University	China	138	10
74=	University of Science and Technology of China	China	133	10
74=	North China Electric Power University	China	133	--
76	Xi'an Institute of Posts and Telecommunications	China	131	--
77=	Taif University	KSA	129	20
77=	Vellore Institute of Technology, Chennai	India	129	28
79	Queensland University of Technology	China	128	14
80=	The University of Hong Kong	Hong Kong SAR	126	10
80=	Nanjing University of Science and Technology	China	126	22
80=	University of Waterloo	Canada	126	--
80=	Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology	India	126	--
84	Monash University	Australia	125	15
85=	University College Dublin	Ireland	123	20
85=	University of Science and Technology Beijing	China	123	10
85=	Chongqing University	China	123	19
88	Hong Kong University of Science and Technology	Hong Kong	122	16
89=	Technische Universität Berlin	Berlin	119	--
89=	National University of Singapore	Singapore	119	23
89=	Shanghai University	China	119	13
92	Fujian Normal University	China	118	10
93	University of Sfax	Tunisia	117	13
94=	Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani	India	116	25
94=	Christ University	India	116	--
96	Anna University	India	114	--
97=	Lebanese American University	Lebanon	113	30
97=	Macau University of Science and Technology	Macau SAR	113	24
99	Asia University	Taiwan	112	17
100	École de Technologie Supérieure	Canada	110	13
101=	University of Johannesburg	South Africa	109	28
101=	South China University of Technology	China	109	10
101=	Graphic Era Hill University	India	109	--
104=	ETH Zürich	Switzerland	108	--
104=	Carlos Alvarez College of Business	USA	108	--
106=	Delft University of Technology	Netherlands	107	21
106=	JAIN (Deemed-to-be University)	India	107	--
106=	Imperial College London	UK	107	14
109=	Università degli Studi di Salerno	Italy	106	10
109=	Sichuan University	China	106	11
109=	Carleton University	Canada	106	20
109=	Technische Universität München	Germany	106	11
109=	Tongji University	China	106	--
109=	Prince Sattam Bin Abdulaziz University	KSA	106	20
115=	Guizhou University	China	105	--
115=	Jazan University	KSA	105	--
117=	Universität Zürich	Switzerland	103	12
117=	Università degli Studi di Cagliari	Italy	103	--
119=	Umm Al-Qura University	KSA	102	14
119=	Technische Universität Wien	Austria	102	--
121=	The University of British Columbia	Canada	101	14
121=	University of Luxembourg	Luxemburg	101	11
121=	Princess Nourah Bint Abdulrahman University	KSA	101	16
124=	International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad	India	100	--
124=	Università di Pisa	Italy	100	--
124=	Institute of Computing Technology Chinese Academy of Sciences	China	100	--
124=	Sharda University	India	100	--

 

 

Search dates

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Scopus 27 February

 

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WOS 01 march