Will Harvard be Devastated?

Would the loss of SEVP certification be a catastrophe?

The US government has announced that it has revoked Harvard’s certification under the Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP) to sponsor students for F- and J- visas. Predictably, a federal judge has temporarily blocked that measure. There will be more battles in the courts, and I suspect the judges will be more sympathetic to Harvard than to Trump. However, given the legal provisions on the right of the president to control who can enter the USA, it seems inevitable to a layman that the President will eventually prevail.

But eventually may be longer than the 2026 mid-terms or the 2028 presidential elections.

If the measure is finally implemented, what will be the effect on Harvard?

First, the students. No doubt it will be vexatious, perhaps even traumatic for some, but the prohibition is directed at Harvard, not the students. Those who cannot attend Harvard should be able to get admitted to other schools. Transferring to MIT, Yale, Cornell, or even Michigan or Rutgers might be downward academic mobility, but is it catastrophic? Many students might understandably decide they have had enough of the US and look elsewhere. They would surely be welcome in the UK, Canada, or the rising schools of East Asia or the Gulf.

Next, how would it affect the school’s standing in the international rankings? If Harvard’s score for international students went to zero from its current 69 points in the QS world rankings, it would fall, all else being equal, from 4^th to 9^th place. Sad, but not really a disaster.

But there is something else. QS has announced a new metric, International Research Network, which is not weighted in the overall ranks. This counts the number of countries students come from. It seems that QS is planning to start counting it this year. Harvard has 99.6 for this metric; if the number of countries falls to zero, then Harvard would probably be penalized more. Still, it would likely remain in the global top twenty.

As for Times Higher Education (THE), their rankings are so opaque to the public that it is impossible to tell exactly how far Harvard would fall, but it would probably be two or three places. The impact on the Round University Rankings (RUR), formerly of Russia, now Georgia, would be similar. In Shanghai and other international rankings, there would be no immediate effect.

Harvard’s overall rankings scores are so high that the loss of a single indicator is bearable. An example is in the RUR in 2022, where Harvard appeared to suffer a disastrous loss of institutional income, actually a data entry error, but only fell to second place overall.

There could be some impact on Harvard’s reputation, but that would take a few years to work through the complex ranking machinery of THE and QS.

But, as I have noted in previous posts here and at my blog, Harvard’s academic performance has been sliding downward for at least a decade. It has lost its place at the top of the QS and THE world rankings. In the Shanghai rankings, it has fallen below Princeton for Nobel and Fields awards won by faculty. This year, it will fall below Zhejiang University for publications in Web of Science journals.

In the respected Leiden Ranking, Harvard is now behind dozens of Chinese, Asian, and European universities in mathematics and computer sciences. In the National Taiwan University rankings, the SCImago Institutions Rankings, published in Spain, and University Ranking by Academic Performance, published in Türkiye, it is trailing in engineering.

If Harvard does lose those international students, would there be a serious decline in the quality of students? We have heard that one consequence of the abandonment of standardized testing in 2020 is that students at Harvard require remedial math teaching at a lower secondary level. I doubt if any of those students needing remediation are international, so maybe there could be a decline, especially in STEM subjects, in the overall cognitive skills of typical Harvard students.

But, I suspect that is unlikely. Every year, stories appear in the blogosphere about students with perfect SAT scores, perfect high school GPAs, leadership qualities shown by exotic extracurriculars, captaincies of sports teams, and so on. Not infrequently, these complaints are accompanied by comments that their essay probably wasn’t good enough or that they was probably insufficiently passionate about their future major.

If it wanted, Harvard could surely find sufficient students from across America to replace the international students. Some would undoubtedly come from other Ivies or maybe the big state universities. Others might even come from mid-tier liberal arts colleges.

It is also possible that Harvard would consider abandoning or modifying its holistic admissions policy. No doubt the university would suffer a bit if its students included some lacking in passion, uninterested in activism, or devoid of character, but at least they would have the academic skills needed to survive in a world-class university.

If Harvard still could not find enough American students of that requisite ability, that might inspire them to start thinking about improving American educational standards at the primary and secondary levels. It does, after all, have a well-funded and influential education school.

However, Harvard’s real problem is not with the quality of students but the amount of money they come with. It is well known that international students typically pay the full sticker price for tuition. That, AI tells me, could contribute as much as 2% of its total income. It isn’t the best and brightest that would not come to Harvard, but the best and the richest. But colleges across America and worldwide, and thousands of small businesses in recent years, have had to cope with much worse than that.

Then here is, of course, the diversity argument. Having students from diverse cultures and backgrounds is supposed to benefit all students. The force of this argument would be greater if Harvard had not fostered a culture of conformity among faculty and students. It has become effectively a one-party university, where dissent is met with harassment. See the cases of Carole Hooven, Tyler J. VanderWeele, and Ronald Sullivan.

Harvard has become estranged from half of the USA. If it wanted exposure to diverse cultures, it could start looking to Appalachia or the Rust Belt for students and faculty.

The current situation actually could be the remaking of Harvard if the energy invested in fighting fairly mild sanctions was diverted into searching for hidden talents in America, reforming the high school system, and learning from the remarkable scientific and academic rise of China.