But in the face of growing global competition, the country’s performance has been slipping over the years. Overall, 201 US universities have been ranked in the QS 2023 report, the highest globally, followed by the United Kingdom’s 90 and China’s 71 universities.

As many as 103 US-based universities have shown an overall decline in performance, drawn up on the basis of academic reputation (40 per cent weightage), employer reputation (10 per cent), faculty-student ratio (20 per cent), citations per faculty (20 per cent), international faculty ratio (5 per cent and international students ratio (5 per cent).

QS senior vice-president Ben Sowter said the numbers indicated that US’ hegemony in higher education was “starting to wane, due to encroaching excellence from abroad”. For now, though, the US continues to rank head and shoulder above others.

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Five US universities are in the league of the global top 10. While MIT remained at the top for the 11th consecutive year, Stanford University occupied the third position globally for the second straight year. It is followed by Harvard University, ranked fifth internationally, California Institute of Technology (sixth globally) and University of Chicago, ranked tenth.

A closer look at the rankings shows that the US’ dominance owes much to the performance of its universities in research. Eight out of the world’s top 10 institutions for citations per faculty are in the US.

“Harvard University unsurprisingly takes the top spot; no university in the world produces more research in terms of sheer scholarly output nor has any university generated more citations between 2016 and 2020. It has produced some 165,201 papers over this period or some 5% of US’ total output,” read the QS report.