The nation was distracted by other things when a quiet warning sounded: Support was diminishing for American academic research that had led to breakthroughs and innovation.
That familiar-sounding worry came not this year, but near the end of World War II, in a pivotal government study by the wartime Office of Scientific Research and Development.
The response then: infusions of government cash that would propel the U.S. higher education system into international preeminence over the subsequent decades.
American colleges and universities rose to the ranks of the best in the world. They attracted top scholars who won a disproportionate number of Nobel Prizes. They helped drive the innovation economy. As trade deficits beset other industries, education became the sixth-largest U.S. services export. At their peak enrollment, international students brought in more than $40 billion a year.
Now, as a new academic year begins, American dominance in higher education globally is incontrovertibly in decline, according to data, international rankings and independent experts.
The slide has been accelerated by a year and a half of funding cuts, restrictions on international students and curbs on what can be said or taught. But it began before those political challenges, with enrollment declines, lackluster returns on ever-rising prices and public mistrust.
“It takes a while for all of these problems to trickle down, but they are beginning to trickle down,” said Eric Mlyn, a faculty fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University who studies academic freedom.
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Top scholars are leaving. Fewer international students are coming. U.S. universities are slipping in international rankings. And American universities have failed to keep pace as other countries pour resources into their higher education systems.
Chinese institutions, for example, have increased their production of graduates with doctoral degrees much faster than American ones in the critical fields of science, technology, engineering and math. Rather than expanding, U.S. doctoral programs are now admitting fewer candidates or have stopped accepting new applicants altogether.
This has myriad impacts on all Americans. Falling behind in research imperils the nation’s economic competitiveness, for instance. And attracting fewer international learners — and the subsidies they represent to universities’ bottom lines — is already affecting the services and majors available to domestic students, and could increase the cost.
So dire has the situation become that the American Academy of Arts and Sciences hosted a discussion about it in June. The title: “Is the U.S. Losing Its Edge as a Global Education Leader?”
The answer is yes, said Mlyn, who was one of the panelists. “There are so many issues threatening America’s global standing,” he said.
The number of U.S. universities in the top 100 of the QS World University Rankings has fallen from 31 to 26 in the past 10 years, while Chinese universities are moving up. The Times Higher Education World University Rankings still puts seven U.S. universities among the top 10. But the smallest number ever made the top 500, while Asian universities rose.
Related: As international enrollment falls, U.S. students face program cuts and higher prices
International standings like these “are the global symbol for geopolitical strength on the world stage, and they’re very influential in people’s decision about where to study,” said Phil Baty, the Times Higher’s chief global affairs officer. “If you start seeing the slow diminution of rankings, that means you’re becoming less attractive to that talent. Then it could be a really serious downward spiral.”
In the next Times Higher rankings — due out Sept. 30 — U.S. institutions continue to fall in comparative measures of reputation and research quality, Baty said.
“It does feel like a tipping point,” he said.
Universities in China annually turn out nearly 50 percent more Ph.D. graduates in science, technology, engineering and math than U.S. universities do, according to the National Science Foundation, or NSF. That’s partly a reflection of China’s larger population. But the pace of STEM Ph.D. production is also rising much more quickly in China than in the United States. It doubled in the 15 years ending in 2022, while the number of U.S. Ph.D. graduates in STEM rose two-fifths as fast, or by 41 percent, an analysis by fDi Intelligence found.
Chinese universities now hold seven of the top 10 places in the Leiden Rankings from the Centre for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University, which ranks institutions based on the number of journal articles published by their faculties — a seemingly arcane but consequential measure of academic productivity in which Harvard has fallen from first in the world to third.
Researchers in China produced 28 percent of English language articles about artificial intelligence, worldwide, between 2018 and 2023, compared with 16 percent by scholars in the United States, according to the Emerging Technology Observatory at Georgetown University.
While they may have produced less research during that period than their Chinese counterparts, American scholars still ranked higher on how often their work was cited by others, the NSF noted — an important indication of its relative quality. And some of the most prestigious U.S. universities were still holding their own at the top of those most recent international rankings.
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But the Trump administration has since cut billions of dollars in research funding, resulting in layoffs and uncertainty. And while many of those initial cuts were restored by courts, federal agencies have slowed the awarding of new grants.
The administration’s 2027 budget request would reduce spending on the NSF and National Institutes of Health by 55 percent and 13 percent, respectively, according to the nonpartisan law and policy organization the Brennan Center for Justice, and shift some of what money remains away from universities.
“We have the success of the postwar period to show that the current model works pretty well,” said Steven Durlauf, an economist at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy, referring to the historic role of the federal government in supporting academic research. Today, with funding uncertainty at least and cuts at worst, said Durlauf, “we’re on a suicidal trajectory.”
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Blaming the interruptions in funding that have already occurred, top research universities have admitted 15 percent fewer doctoral students for the coming fall, including in fields such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing, according to the Association of American Universities, or AAU. Many didn’t take any new doctoral students at all.
Doctoral programs train scientists to teach and conduct research in fields including technology and treatments for medical problems.
“America faces the alarming prospect of losing an entire generation of scientific talent,” the AAU says.
Just after the start of the second Trump administration, about half of Ph.D. students and postdoctoral researchers in bioengineering said they were likely to leave academia, according to a survey by researchers at Harvard, MIT and elsewhere. The proportion who said they’d likely leave the United States was also up.
Three in four U.S.-based researchers overall have considered leaving the country, according to another survey, by the journal Nature, conducted before some of the Trump administration’s harshest actions against universities and colleges.
Forty-five percent of faculty in yet another survey, by researchers at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, said they had considered jobs outside of higher education in the last three years, and a third that they had considered opportunities outside of the United States. Most said changes in state or federal policy were instrumental in their job searches.
At least 85 scholars have moved to China since the start of 2024, CNN reporting found, including several at the top of their fields — most recently, Nobel Prize-winning chemist Omar Yaghi, who is leaving the University of California, Berkeley, for Tsinghua University in China to help establish an institute that will use AI to speed up the development of new materials.
American scientists collectively submitted 32 percent more applications for jobs abroad in the first quarter of last year than in the same period the year before, according to a separate analysis by Nature.
U.S. universities “have been magnets for talent because they have provided an exchange: ‘Come build your research lab at our university — you’ll get all these talented students, we have labs, we have government funding,’ ” said Kumar Garg, a science and technology adviser in the Obama administration and now president of Renaissance Philanthropy, which helps channel private funds to research. “If that bundle starts unraveling, this no longer works.”
Meanwhile, the flow of international students coming to the United States has slowed dramatically, with as much as a 22 percent decline in the number who arrived last summer compared with the summer before.
Nearly six in 10 universities and colleges say the number of applications they received from international students fell again for the academic year about to start, a survey by the Institute of International Education found. More than 40 percent reported a “substantial” decline in applications for graduate study. NAFSA: Association of International Educators and the education technology company JB International project a drop of 111,000 international students this fall, costing the economy $3.4 billion.
“The U.S. has thrived because the world’s smartest people flock to the United States, and that is definitely stalling,” said Baty, of the Times Higher.
This slide follows federal delays in issuing new student visas, the detentions and deportations of international students for their political activism and screenings of international student applicants’ social media posts.
Even before those steps, however — as the price of U.S. higher education continued to rise — “cost was a larger reason” for international students reconsidering coming to the United States, said Rona Aydin, who works with them as founder of the international college admissions counseling company Oriel Admissions.
Now, said Aydin, prospective applicants who previously would have only considered American universities “are also thinking about backup countries. That’s a shift.”
Yet another rule, restricting international students to four years in the United States, takes effect Sept. 15. Four years is less time than is needed to complete many Ph.D. and other academic programs, and the new limit is likely to further reduce the supply of international students coming to the country.
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Also, while it’s still too early to see their effects, new limits on federal loans for graduate study will leave about one-fourth of domestic graduate-school borrowers unable to continue to pay for their educations, projections suggest.
In some states, faculty have faced constraints on what they can teach and threats to protections such as tenure.
Institutional autonomy at U.S. universities has eroded by 50 percent in the decade ending in 2025, and especially since the first Trump administration, according to the Academic Freedom Index produced by researchers at Germany’s University of Erlangen-Nuremberg.
“The decline in institutional autonomy in the United States stands out as a case of fast and steep deterioration,” the researchers wrote in March.
Tenure can keep scientists from leaving academia for better-paying jobs in private industry, as more may now do, said Kenan Sahin, author of “American Educational Excellence,” a book about the strengths of the U.S. education system, and a life member of the governing board at MIT, which he attended as an international student before founding what would become a multibillion-dollar tech company.
Those researchers without tenure who remain at universities may stick to “safe” ideas rather than seek out potential breakthroughs and risk failure, Sahin said.
Seventy percent of Americans now say higher education in the United States is going in the wrong direction, up from 56 percent in 2020, according to Pew. Adults who went to college are more likely to say this than those who didn’t.
That falloff in confidence began before the current political attacks and is largely because of people’s skepticism about what they’re getting for their money, Pew’s and other surveys show.
The United States spends among the most in the world on higher education, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, or OECD. But it ranks 15th and 17th, respectively, in the proportion of 25- to 34-year-olds who have degrees, depending on whether their parents did or didn’t go to college. That’s down from second overall 20 years ago.
The impact of these many intersecting trends is already underway.
There have been more than 320 instances of college and university layoffs, program cuts, department eliminations and closings since January 2024, according to the database CollegeCuts, which tracks this. Even Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences is running a $350 million deficit, which it attributes partly to an increased federal tax on its endowment.
“Universities went through a multidecade period where they existed in a bipartisan halo, where people might disagree about lots of things, but having cutting-edge universities was a thing everybody could agree on and was willing to invest in,” Garg said.
U.S. higher education institutions “really are deep wells of talent. Their strengths are real,” he said. But “we should not sleep on the fact that if we don’t adapt and navigate this moment, we’re going to wake up and all of the premier universities won’t be in the United States, and we’ll wonder how that happened.”
Contact writer Jon Marcus at 212-678-7556, jmarcus@hechingerreport.org or jpm.82 on Signal.
This story about threats to U.S. higher education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter.
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