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I think it would harm Harvard a lot. For one they would no longer be eligible for the US News college rankings list. Going from a consistent top 5 to not in contention doesn't seem good for admissions or donation solicitation.
The story will not fully be "Trump targeted us unfairly and stripped our accreditation". It will also include "they already got sued and lost for being racist (SFFA v. Harvard), they refused to stop being racist, now they lost their accreditation. Also antisemitism." Yes Harvard will always be a prestigious institution, yes it would survive the loss, but its still a pretty big egg in the face. I'm not sure they can spin their way out of it. Especially after SFFA v. Harvard.
Students losing ability to transfer credits, losing federal subsidized loans, no student aid would all follow the loss. None of which I think would matter too much, of course everyone will still clamor for Harvard. But accreditation as a concept will survive for these things alone, Pell Grants and subsidized loans may not matter to Harvard students, but they sure do matter for almost everyone else.
And if accreditation were destroyed - what does the current administration lose?
The US News rankings would cease to be relevant if Harvard wasn't on them. They basically started the rankings by figuring out that Harvard, Yale, Princeton should be at the top and backwards engineering how to rank the other schools by what metrics make those schools the top schools. It's like taking the obvious undisputed champion out of your boxing federation, or FIFA kicking out UEFA.
None of the rankings or loans or grants really matter, as long as businesses keep hiring from Harvard, bar associations keep admitting Harvard Law grads, Medical Boards keep licensing Harvard Med grads, other schools keep admitting Harvard undergrads to grad school or hiring Harvard PhDs for professorships, etc.
If 90% of Harvard Law grads get prestige jobs out of school, but the rankings don't include Harvard, we'll just get new "true" rankings somewhere.
And that's pretty much the story top to bottom.
Ok in the context of what you are saying US News doesn't matter. I think Harvard and Yale etc. care for bragging rights. But big picture doesn't matter.
If Harvard Law loses accreditation then Harvard Law grads will absolutely not be hired. In most states, by law, you can't sit even sit for the bar if you don't graduate from an accredited law school. Likewise with Harvard Medical - graduation from an accredited medical school is a requirement for a license in most states. So if accreditation is lost, these schools are done.
https://www.princetonreview.com/law-school-advice/law-school-accreditation https://lcme.org/about/
The agencies that accredit HLS and HMS are given approval from the Department of Education. The DoEd has a lot of power over these institutions, but not direct power to just go in and delist Harvard. But it can apply a lot of pressure. Enough to kick out Harvard? No idea. My guess is not unless forced. The ABA seems very liberal, they're already fighting Trump tooth and nail.
The thing is Harvard Law grads basically want to work in like three or four places (coming out of law school) and they're all in blue states. NYC and Cali big law and clerkships alone could easily absorb a few HLS classes. I'd imagine on the med school side it's similar. New York and California professional associations are unlikely to go along with Trump on the topic.
More likely Trump could manage to drag down the whole concept of accreditation and college rankings in this scenario. Which would be a good thing for the world, actually. But the schools most harmed would be schools like UVA or some of the UC campuses or Michigan, schools that have national profiles thanks to rankings, not the ivies Berkeley Stanford, which have a national profile independent of rankings. If anything the lesser ivies would benefit from a world where Ivy league carries more cache again without the rankings to interfere.
At any rate I support them for the same reason I supported Musk buying Twitter: what's the point of Fuck You money if you never say Fuck You?
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This only works as long as everyone who currently demands accreditation decides to edit it to be "accredited or Harvard", which might work for some duration (and also scales in difficulty as the list of exceptions lengthens), but probably still drops their prestige as red state post-graduate schools (law, medical) no longer accept their degrees and red administrations have a seemingly viewpoint-neutral ("non-accredited degree!") way to scour the civil service of their graduates: suddenly a degree from Yale is "just as good as Harvard, with a few more doors open" and its actual outcomes suffer.
Not saying all those outcomes are likely, but none of them strikes me as unforseeable. The alternatives would be the wholesale devaluation of accreditation, but I think that's spread widely enough (how many state laws would have to change?) that it'd be more painful than Harvard-aligned organizations tracking exceptions.
The thing about it is basically every Harvard undergrad would most want to go to Harvard grad school, and most of the rest of their choices will be other blue state schools. Blue states certainly have enough grad schools to keep it running.
Accreditation literally doesn't matter for Harvard or Stanford except as a technicality, it matters to East Sheepdick Bible College.
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Are they "too big to fail"?
No, but if a sports league gets rid of the best team, it hurts the league because you now know that the league champion is getting a tin belt, they're not the real best in the world.
Magnus Carlson chose not to defend his world championship. Sucks to be Ding Liren.
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They're Harvard. The US News college rankings list is irrelevant to them. US News would probably modify their policies to keep them there, because not having Harvard on the list would hurt the authority of the list more than it would hurt Harvard.
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