Nations Chasing Harvard Merge Colleges to Ascend Rankings

Ten miles from King Louis XIV’s Palace of Versailles, another monument to French ambition is rising out of muddy wheat fields.

Twenty colleges and research institutes are combining to create Universite Paris-Saclay, soon to be one of France’s largest universities, at a cost of about 6.5 billion euros ($9 billion). It’s France’s bid to crack the top of rankings that increasingly dominate international higher education.