High-school students across Asia are pulling ahead of their Western peers, an annual global assessment indicates, as artificial intelligence spurs a worldwide race for talent and reshapes how young people learn.
In a troubling trend, reading, science and math performance among 15-year-olds has continued a decline globally across the board, according to the 2025 Programme for International Student Assessment released this week by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
But among last year’s top performers were students in the Chinese cities of Beijing and Shanghai, Chinese provinces Jiangsu and Zhejiang, and the city-state of Singapore. Japan and South Korea were also in the Asia-dominated top 10 across all three subjects, along with the semi-autonomous Chinese city of Macao, and the self-governing democracy of Taiwan.
Meanwhile, secondary students in the US saw their reading scores fall close to 25-year lows, lagging more starkly behind their counterparts in China, which have long held a lead in the exams known for short as PISA – at least in the four major Chinese jurisdictions that submitted test scores.
The exam results come amid an intensifying rivalry between the US and China to outpace the other in technological advancement and direct more funding toward innovation. China has surpassed the US in published scientific reports as well as research spending, on which both nations exceeded $1 trillion in 2024.
