Chinese universities have recorded a significant rise in the 2026 global university rankings, strengthening the country’s position as a major force in higher education. Several institutions moved up the table, reflecting sustained investment in research, international collaboration, and academic capacity.
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According to the New York Times report, “For 2026, and for the 10th year in a row, Times Higher Education (THE) ranked Oxford University as the number one university in the world. The rest of the organisation’s top five ranked universities are M.I.T., Princeton, the University of Cambridge, and then Harvard, tied with Stanford, which were also the top ranked institutions last year.”
The U.S. institutions held seven of the top 10 spots in the 2026 ranking. But farther down the list, American universities are slipping. Not less than 62 U.S. universities were ranked lower than in 2025, while only 19 rose.
While some well-known American schools have slipped, the trend is becoming increasingly noticeable. Duke University, for instance, was ranked 20 in 2021, and now is ranked 28. Over that same time span, Emory University dropped to 102 from 85. Ten years ago, Notre Dame ranked 108; now it is ranked 194.
However, in China, the reverse seemed to be the case. Ten years ago, two prominent Beijing schools, Peking University and Tsinghua University were ranked 42 and 47 in Times Higher Education’s list, and now they are just below the top 10: Tsinghua was ranked 12, and Peking 13.
Six schools in Hong Kong are now in the top 200; South Korea placed four in the top 100.
According to Alex Usher, president of Higher Education Strategy Associates, a Toronto education consulting company, the pressures that could reduce Harvard’s research output, such as federal grant reductions and cuts to the institution’s Ph.D. programmes are unlikely to show up immediately in rankings.
“If you’re looking at how many articles end up in ‘Nature’ or ‘Science’ from that institution, that is based on research that started four or five years ago. There is a pretty serious time lag. I wouldn’t expect that to have a big impact in the next few years,” Usher said.
While China is thriving in disciplines such as chemistry and environmental sciences, the United States and Europe remain dominant in others, such as general biology and medical sciences. Besides, a research has suggested that Chinese researchers have been boosting their citation rankings by citing one another more often than western researchers tend to cite other westerners.
University rankings are an old phenomenon, dating back to the early 20th Century, according to Alan Ruby, senior fellow and director of global engagement at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania.
Students often use rankings to help them decide where to apply, and academics use them as guides to where to work and conduct research, he said. Some governments use them in doling out research money, and some employers see them as a tool for quickly sorting large numbers of entry-level job candidates.
“If you’re trying to attract the best talent in the world, be it students or researchers or faculty, you want to have that signaling power of, ‘We’re a highly ranked institution,'” Ruby said.
Paul Musgrave, a professor of government at Georgetown University’s campus in Doha, Qatar emphasised that beyond marketing, rankings matter because the quality of universities matter. “It can be difficult to draw a direct line between good universities and national power,” he said, but “on the other hand, we all know that when the Germans wrecked their universities in the 1930s it probably hurt them in a lot of ways,” Musgrave noted.
Moreover, a study has shown that China has been investing in research and trying to draw in scientists as the United States pulls back.
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 the country to study or do business.
The shifting landscape in global university rankings reflects broader changes in higher education investment, research priorities, and international collaboration, with China emerging as an increasingly formidable competitor to traditional Western academic powerhouses.
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