California in the Shanghai Rankings

Global rankings are often misleading and uninformative, especially those that have eccentric methodologies or are subject to systematic gaming. But if their indicators are objective and reliable over several years, they can tell us something about shifts in the international distribution of research excellence.

I would like to look at 20 years of the Shanghai Rankings from the first edition in 2003 to the most recent, published this week. The first thing that anyone notices is of course the remarkable rise of China -- not Asia in general -- and the relative decline of the USA. These rankings can also be used to find regional trends within nations. Take a look at California universities. In 2003 California was the research star of the US with six universities in the world top twenty. Two decades later that number has fallen to five with the University of California (UC) San Diego falling from 14th to 21st place.

That is symptomatic of a broader trend. UC Santa Barbara has fallen from 25th to 57th, the University of Southern California from 40th to 55th, and UC Riverside from 88th to the 201-300 band. 

American universities in nearly all the states have been falling and have, for the most part, been replaced, by Chinese institutions. But even within the USA California has been drifting downwards. Caltech has gone from 3rd to 7th, UC San Francisco, a medical school, from 11th to 15th, and UC Davis from 27th to band 40-54.

This is not universal. Stanford is still second in the USA in 2022 while UC Los Angeles (UCLA) has risen from 13th to 11th.

But overall California is falling. Of the thirteen universities in the top 500 in 2003, nine had fallen in the US table by 2022, two, UC Santa Cruz and UCLA, rose and, two remained in the same rank. The decline is especially apparent in the Publications metric, which is based on recent articles in the Web of Science.

Recent events in California, including learning loss during the pandemic, the abandonment of standardised testing, and the imposition of political loyalty tests for faculty, suggest that the decline is not going to be halted or reversed any time soon.