Is the solution to refocus on academic and research excellence, and away from social justice issues?
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Harvard only has a limited amount it can fall. It has enough money in its endowment to continue its fully 100% needs covered, fully needs blind admissions + bonus 100% coverage for those under a certain income indefinitely, which only a few institutions can rival. This will keep the selectivity high regardless of anything else. And this selectivity will naturally keep its average graduate salary up (since at least most of the difference in income between graduates of different institutions is because of their selectivity). It’s research for most areas, while usually good, generally has never been the top, but only PhD students really care about research rankings.
The article is all doomer about 17% less ED applicants. So what? Even if they get 100% less RD applicants, that would still be a 6% acceptance rate. Even if they lose half the annual normal endowment gifts for the rest of time, they will continue to be one of the richest colleges in the world.
Basically, things will keep going on, but maybe some arbitrary college rankings might put it at 4th or even 5th on their lists. The horror! 
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The “spiral” is being aggravated by the media, including, surprisingly, the NY Times. Bashing Harvard is, I guess, seen as good for selling newspapers.
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I agree. And most of the people bashing Harvard would probably not have their kid turn down Harvard if they got in.
This isn’t true though. Differences in income are driven primarily by the industries most graduates end up in, and their location.
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Harvard is going to remain prestigious and popular - many of the hand wringers would jump at the chance to send junior to Harvard if they got in. With a reputation like theirs, coupled with their massive endowment, I’m not at all worried about their future (and for the record I have zero relationship with Harvard).
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“Help me Obi Wan, you’re my only hope.”
I agree wholeheartedly with the comments above that Harvard will remain Harvard.
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This isn’t true though. Differences in income are driven primarily by the industries most graduates end up in, and their location.
This isn’t true when looking at the data. If it was, you’d expect that most state-regional polytechnic college to outperform Princeton in financial outcomes, but only some of the “elite” polytech ones do.
Controlling for GPA, test scores, and what colleges students applied applied to, most colleges with less than 50% acceptance rate have about the same financial outcomes for students, with first gens and minority students being slight outliers with a 5-10% 10 year income difference based on school selectivity/prestige.
Then, with the same controls, comparing institutions with under 50% to those with 50-75%, 75-85%, and 85+%, the income differences are roughly 10%, 15%, and 20%, respectively, based on the research I’ve read.
With the same controls but also controlling for major, and using a binary classification based on institutional average ACT test score rather than percent accepted (renormalized to acceptance rate is probably something like looking for below or above 80%ish acceptance rate), for business majors and social sciences the selectivity made a bigger difference then education, health, and humanities majors, with STEM being somewhere between.
Of course, this doesn’t factor in other factors like college essays, extra curriculars, and so on, which could possibly financial outcome make it even more directly correlated to “student quality” and outcome rather than the institutions themselves.
So while yes, for individual students, major will be the biggest factor, most institutions do offer CS majors, engineering majors, and economics majors, so then one needs to ask why Princeton graduates earn 2-3 times the amount of money of several state regional college graduates, and the answer seems to mostly be that Princeton is selecting students from higher socieconomic backgrounds and students with more drive in high school, and a minor further boost from networking with other students with these factors. If you kidnapped a Princeton student and through them into a random other college, they would still have good income outcomes because of their socioeconomic background and/or drive, but maybe somewhat less then they would at Princeton because of networking.
At any rate, that was what I was trying to convey. Harvard will still be selecting students that will have good financial outcomes in expectation no matter what Harvard does or does not do.
Sources: Dale, Stacy B., and Alan B. Krueger. “Estimating the effects of college characteristics over the career using administrative earnings data.” Journal of human resources 49, no. 2 (2014): 323-358.
Witteveen, Dirk, and Paul Attewell. “The earnings payoff from attending a selective college.” Social Science Research 66 (2017): 154-169.
Quadlin, Natasha, Emma D. Cohen, and Tom VanHeuvelen. “Same major, same economic returns? College selectivity and earnings inequality in young adulthood.” Research in Social Stratification and Mobility 75 (2021): 100647.
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I think both things can be true at the same time: 1) Yes, Harvard attracts a disproportionate number of hard-driving kids who would probably do just fine anywhere they enrolled, and 2) a disproportionate number of Harvard grads head for Wall Street and IB positions (mainly because it’s a target school for those industries.)
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Harvard is the new Columbia I guess.
I’m always very skeptical these sorts of things will have durable, long-term effects, versus the sorts of fundamental factors that made and then kept these institutions among the wealthiest and most famous in the world. I’m not at all persuaded by the analogy to car brands, because of course there are no such durable fundamentals when it comes to cars.
That doesn’t mean I think it is impossible for institutional status to change over time, indeed in fact we have seen cases of that happening in this field. I just think when it does happen, it is for much more basic reasons than this, often in fact involving money in some way.
You shouldn’t assume that the students who chose not to apply were at the same talent level as the entire application pool. Instead, they were the ones confident enough to say “I don’t need Harvard”.
Remember that it’s not just students that compete to get acceptances to the “best” colleges. Colleges also compete to get the best students. Despite what colleges say, it’s never been true that a college could throw out everyone who was admitted and replace them with no loss in quality.
There is only one Amanda Gorman, only one David Hogg, only a small number of major STEM award winners, and a few Concord Review Ralph Waldo Emerson award winners. These are the students in the drivers seat who effectively say “I will choose Harvard”, and not the other way around. They are also the ones most capable of saying “I don’t need Harvard”
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What you say is 100% true, but those type of students are a tiny fraction of the applicant pool and we have no idea whether or not it is those students that are opting out of Harvard, or if the pool that is opting out is made up of more “typical” Harvard applicants. S24 did not apply to Harvard despite his outstanding academic profile - typically students with his profile (from our HS) do. He rightly supposed that Harvard isn’t interested in students like him - top notch academically, but unhooked, and from an area of the country that is overrepresented. Maybe more kids like my son are waking up and deciding against wasting their time and money applying to Harvard.
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Many wonderful Jewish students will no longer apply to Harvard, at least until the school is perceived to have taken serious, enduring actions against antisemitism. This is a huge loss for the school.
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Thanks for sharing this post
Harvard takes another hit.
Gift link: Harvard Probe Finds Honesty Researcher Engaged in Scientific Misconduct
A lot of people already believed that Francesco Gino had committed fraud. The case against her had been outlined on YouTube months ago, and it was damning.
What made it apparent was how sloppily she had done it. For example, there was a spreadsheet where all the columns were sorted (e.g. by Column A, then B, etc.). She modified data in some columns to get the results she wanted, but then left the spreadsheet unsorted, so it stood out like a sore thumb.
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I don’t think this is “another hit” on Harvard.
“It is refreshing to see such full and open reporting in this case.”
Harvard bashing always makes good newsprint just like Goldman Sachs bashing or McKinsey bashing or “anything most people wish they could achieve” bashing.
It’s too bad that an interest group united by foreign nationalism and headed by a disgruntled donor has sought to attack a university generally made up of people who are so busy trying to be at the forefront of knowledge, not get scooped and solve problems central to humanity that they are not political on a daily basis - unlike billionare CEO’s for example.
Yes, if prodded, biochemistry and classics professors have opinions. No, these aren’t by any ridiculous exaggeration center stage. Before anyone calls FIRE, you should read the actual survey questions and “events” that led to Harvard’s bad rating by FIRE. For example, rescinding admission to Kyle Kashuv who repeatedly wrote and spoke the N-word and called for genocide of his own religious group. That was one of the horrible free speech violations that Harvard is accused of. The survey questions (answered by <1% of Harvard students) asked if they felt comfortable openly challenging their professor about controversial topics. Almost no questions were even relevant to the administration, though that is what FIRE is being used to represent.
Academic misconduct exists. At every academic institution. Let’s see this all for what it is. If some students want to take their baseball and play in another field, they’ll miss out on some of the most esteemed, prominent and committed faculty in the country. Their choice. Good news for other kids who want to attend.
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Ackman wasn’t the right messenger, but he had the right message. The political intolerance at Harvard is not healthy, especially compared to say UChicago. I wish I had written down all the outrageous things my son has told me he’s heard over the years.
Now, this political intolerance is a completely separate from the academic misconduct of Francesca Gino. I have no idea what she was thinking.
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And you are saying Harvard is politically intolerant because FIRE says so?
No, I am saying that the reality on the ground is that Harvard is highly intolerant on some topics.
My two children attend(ed) UChicago and Harvard, which happen to be on the opposite ends of the FIRE rating. We’ve often had family discussions on the differences between those two campuses.
UChicago, like all colleges, has its faults. But one thing it does well is promote freedom of expression. Students know going in that they will likely hear things they disagree with, but they are expected to debate them in a civil manner. What this actually means is that badly expressed ideas will be roundly criticized, quite often by people on the same side politically. It’s part of the culture there.
But at Harvard, expressing thoughts that go against the norm (such as “Israel should be able to defend itself”) can result in a crowd yelling at you.
I really don’t know much about the FIRE rankings and their methodology. But I do know that the relative rankings of UChicago and Harvard are appropriate.
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