Among universities, the Chinese are moving up, USA is moving down

Just think, a century ago most Americans thought of Charlie Chan, a movie detective, when they they thought on the Chinese. And Chinatown, of course. In the 1960s a character named "Hop Sing" appeared as comic relieve in the hit TV program Bonanza. He was the house boy for the wealthy Cartwright family – note the word "boy." And then came the war in Vietnam along with Chairman Mao and his Red Book. When I was in graduate school in the 1970s I took a course on radical approaches to literature, taught be Art Efron. We read a collection of essays on aesthetics written by Mao.

Mark Arsenault, Chinese Universities Surge in Global Rankings as U.S. Schools Slip, NYTimes, Jan 15, 2026. The article opens:

Until recently, Harvard was the most productive research university in the world, according to a global ranking that looks at academic publication.

That position may be teetering, the most recent evidence of a troubling trend for American academia.

Harvard recently dropped to No. 3 on the ranking. The schools racing up the list are not Harvard’s American peers, but Chinese universities that have been steadily climbing in rankings that emphasize the volume and quality of research they produce.

The reordering comes as the Trump administration has been slashing research funding to American schools that depend heavily on the federal government to pay for scientific endeavors. President Trump’s policies did not start the American universities’ relative decline, which began years ago, but they could accelerate it.

“There is a big shift coming, a bit of a new world order in global dominance of higher education and research,” said Phil Baty, chief global affairs officer for Times Higher Education, a British organization unconnected to The New York Times that produces one of the better-known world rankings of universities.

In the middle of this long article:  

The number of international students arriving in the U.S. in August 2025 was 19 percent lower than the year before, a trend that could further hurt the prestige and rankings of American schools if the world’s best minds choose to study and work elsewhere.

China has been pouring billions of dollars into its universities and aggressively working to make them attractive to foreign researchers. In the fall, China began offering a visa specifically for graduates of top universities in science and technology to travel to China to study or do business.

“China has a boatload of money in higher education that it didn’t have 20 years ago,” said Alex Usher, president of Higher Education Strategy Associates, a Toronto education consulting company.

Mr. Xi has made the reasons for the country’s investments explicit, arguing that a nation’s global power depends on its scientific dominance.

There's much more in the article.