By the numbers, the Class of 2026 has witnessed an extraordinary period of upheaval at Harvard: three University presidents, two federal lawsuits and more than a dozen federal investigations, $2.7 billion in research funds lost.

Our class arrived just a few months before Harvard named Claudine Gay as its 30th president, making her the first person of color to lead the University in its nearly 400-year history. Days before she took office, the Supreme Court struck down the use of affirmative action for college admissions in a landmark decision against Harvard.

Sophomore year for the Class of 2026 would prove pivotal for Harvard. Just eight days after Gay’s inauguration in a September downpour, the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel plunged Harvard into months of grief and fury. Israel’s war in Gaza galvanized students to protest, but their activism was also greeted with fears that antisemitism was on the rise. Facing intense scrutiny and a divided campus, Gay withered in an unprecedented leadership crisis for three months before resigning on Jan. 2, 2024.

The Harvard Corporation chose then-Provost Alan M. Garber ’76 to chart a new course: first as interim president, then on a three-year clock, and finally as a permanent fixture. Garber’s hold on the reins proved steadier, but his term, too, would be defined by an escalating backlash against higher education.

President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January 2025 kicked the crisis into overdrive. His administration continues to target the University after blacklisting it from federal funds and attempting to block its ability to host international students last spring.

The political reaction began to take hold in Cambridge as Harvard dismantled its diversity offices and pushed out the leaders of controversial academic programs. Meanwhile, campus leaders redoubled their emphasis on “viewpoint diversity,” floating plans to change the ideological composition of its faculty.

The student experience changed during the Class of 2026’s time at Harvard, too: We were the last class to form linking groups before Housing Day, to experience the adrenaline rush of an unsanctioned River Run, and to register for classes only weeks before they began. We benefited from one semester of free laundry before the imposition of mandatory fees next year. And we watched longtime College Dean Rakesh Khurana depart his role, replaced by the Harvard Kennedy School professor David J. Deming.

Now, the Class of 2026 is leaving on the cusp of another set of major changes to Harvard’s classrooms — narrowly missing reductions in teaching staff, planned administrative layoffs, and a new cap on awarding A grades. We are entering a workforce fundamentally reshaped by artificial intelligence — a technology in its infancy when we first stepped foot on campus.

The Crimson’s annual survey of the senior class captures our unique view of an evolving campus. Recounting our political views, academic records, social scenes, and future aspirations, the survey reviews how graduates have changed during our time at Harvard — and how Harvard has changed around us.

Methodology

The Crimson distributed the survey by email to 1,714 graduating seniors and members of the social Class of 2026 using Harvard directory information sourced in May 2026. Participants accessed the survey form via personalized anonymous links from May 3 until May 15, 2026, when the survey closed. During that period, The Crimson collected 680 surveys, representing a response rate of 40 percent of those who received the survey.

The data includes academic and social seniors. 6 percent indicated they matriculated earlier than 2022, meaning they took leaves of absence from Harvard and later re-classed as members of the Class of 2026. Meanwhile, 4 percent indicated that they will graduate in December of 2026 or later, meaning they affiliate as “Social Seniors” but will not graduate with the majority of their class this May. Overall, 10 percent took time off from Harvard.

To check for potential response bias, The Crimson compared respondent demographics with publicly available information on admitted student demographics provided by the University — information regarding gender, race, and ethnicity. Overall, the respondents to the survey were broadly in line with the demographics of the student body. (Male students and Black students were slightly underrepresented relative to their proportions in the class that matriculated to Harvard, and Asian students were slightly overrepresented. Harvard does not publicly release data on the current demographics of its student body.) The data was not otherwise adjusted for response biases.