Higher education is in crisis. Once considered a pinnacle of American achievement, our universities today face a historic deficit of public confidence, driven by the perception (and reality) that academia has prized political activism over truth-seeking.
With pressure mounting from students, parents, alumni, and policymakers, now is a time of great uncertainty for the American university—yet also an opportunity for experimentation, innovation, and reform. Some elite universities seem bent on discrediting themselves; others stand out for their efforts to enact meaningful change. In a telling trend, a growing number of students now flock to Southern universities, many of which, unlike their Ivy League counterparts, have preserved or expanded their commitments to open inquiry, intellectual pluralism, and critical thinking.
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Yet too many Americans remain guided by the old markers of prestige. The brightest students often assume by default that the best education will come from a Harvard, Yale, or Stanford. These same institutions continue to exert disproportionate cultural and professional influence. These legacy elite schools remain well-positioned primarily because everyone sees them as the best, not because they are actually providing the best undergraduate education.
In other words, we find, at present, a mismatch between reputation and reality. This is due, in part, to the fact that prospective students and parents lack access to the information they need to determine which school is best for them. As Americans rethink higher education, they need new tools to help them make better decisions.
The most well-known college-ranking schemes offer conventional answers to questions about “America’s best colleges” because they lack an understanding of the purpose and effect of higher education. Education is an activity that shapes the soul, as ancient writers would have put it. For better and for worse, college shapes students’ minds, characters, and futures; but the well-known college-ranking schemes focus on factors that tell you almost nothing about how attending a particular college will affect your life. They reveal little to nothing about the content of the education that you’ll receive, the classroom and campus environment that you’ll encounter, and the values that will surround you. A reliable university evaluation tool should be organized around these factors.
City Journal now offers such a tool. In consultation with our friends at the National Association of Scholars, we have put together the first genuinely holistic evaluation of America’s most prominent schools. We have collected data on 100 colleges and universities that receive high scores in other ranking systems, that are widely known to the American public, or that have major regional significance. We are unaware of any college-ranking system incorporating a greater number and variety of factors than the City Journal College Rankings—68 in all. Combining statistics from government sources with metrics from other ranking systems, our approach synthesizes existing data to shed new light on major American colleges and universities.
What really sets our rankings apart, however, is our new data-collection efforts. To provide prospective students with a clearer picture of what they can expect from a particular school, we have developed a wide range of measures that capture dimensions of a college education that other rankings have long neglected.
Does the campus culture encourage free inquiry, or does it impose and endorse ideological orthodoxy? Is the curriculum rigorously designed and well-grounded in the Western tradition, or is it captured by ideological fads? Is the student body ideologically lopsided, or does it reflect the pluralism of American society? Do administrators prioritize “scholar activism” over academic excellence? Will the institution do a good job equipping its graduates to pay back their tuition and thrive as citizens, workers, and human beings? The City Journal College Rankings provide data-driven answers to these and other critical questions to develop a panoramic view of each university that we evaluate.
Our comprehensive approach produces results that some might find surprising. Consider Harvard. Though the university never falls from the top 10 in most “best college” lists, a majority of its students are uncomfortable expressing their political views, the administration has a dismal record of preventing disruptive protest, curricular requirements are lax, only 3 percent of the faculty identify as conservative, there have been 12 instances since 2020 in which the administration sanctioned students or faculty for their speech, and the campus proudly employed more than 80 Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion bureaucrats before a recent attempt at rebranding their DEI offices. In other words, despite Harvard’s vaunted reputation, it is an environment deeply at odds with a spirit of intellectual discovery.
When considering the growing disorder, faddish curriculum offerings, censorship pressures, and ideological intimidation on Harvard’s campus, we conclude that at least 36 schools in the country would provide a better all-around educational experience for students.
Now consider our list’s top-ranked school: the University of Florida. While UF has often found itself relegated to second-tier status in prestige-obsessed rankings, its leadership has demonstrated a willingness to swim against the current. The university has maintained a strong record on free speech, receiving a “green” rating from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and fully endorsing the Chicago Principles, which seek to protect free expression on campus. The school dismantled its DEI bureaucracy, denied campus radicals the right to take over classrooms and common areas, removed diversity statements from the faculty hiring process, and established the Hamilton School of Classical and Civic Education to lead a return to foundational education. What’s more, UF excels in measures of student outcomes such as retention and graduation rates.
Readers should understand the intuitions underlying these rankings. Our Methodology page not only outlines technical aspects of the rankings but also explains why each of the 68 factors matters. We recommend that interested readers review it to understand the choices that we have made. A project of this kind is not merely a technical, and certainly not a value-neutral, exercise. Our rankings model a common-sense understanding of what contributes to a healthy university culture; much of this understanding is confirmed in academic literature in the field of social psychology.
The 68 factors of our rankings fall into four broad categories: Leadership Quality, Educational Experience, Student Experience, and Outcomes.
Under the category of Leadership Quality, we reward schools whose administrators have refused to allow them to be transformed into stages for performative activists. We also reward university leaders who have shown courage and wisdom in defending truth and excellence as the fundamental goods of a school against internal (and external) actors seeking to undermine them.
Under the category of Educational Experience, we recognize the excellence of institutions that seek through deeds (not mere words) to prioritize intellectual pluralism in faculty hiring, strive to recover core learning in Western civilization and American civics, and have at least begun to resist the absorption of core academic disciplines by faddish and shallow political movements.
Under the category of Student Experience, we reward institutions that foster campus cultures characterized by viewpoint diversity, freedom of thought, varied and benevolent forms of belonging, and resistance to anti-Semitic radicalism.
Under the category of Outcomes, we praise institutions demonstrating that they prepare students for successful careers beyond what would have been expected, given their students’ profiles upon admission. For example, we know that students with high SAT scores will succeed professionally—but what does their university education add to (or subtract from) that anticipated trajectory?
We used the overall scores computed from a weighted indexing of scores on these categories to assign each of our 100 schools a rating of 1 to 5 stars:
5-star school (★★★★★): A total score of 85–100 points. Excellent performance across the board. These schools require no major reforms and serve as models that others should learn from.
4-star school (★★★★): A total score of 70–84.99 points. Strong, often outstanding performance in at least one area and solid elsewhere. Well-designed, targeted improvements will move these schools into the top tier.
3-star school (★★★): A total score of 55–69.99 points. Mixed results across our four categories, showing strengths in some and weakness in others. These schools typically have several clear paths to improvement.
2-star school (★★): A total score of 40–54.99 points. Mostly average to below-average scores in all categories with no particularly noteworthy strengths. Significant, focused policy changes are needed at these schools.
1-star school (★): A total score under 40 points. Systemic underperformance across all four of our categories. These institutions urgently need major-broad-based reforms.
We do not believe that it is impossible to receive a decent education at a college near the bottom of our list, or that a student attending a university at the top of our list is guaranteed a good education. Far from it: many schools near or at the top of our rankings employ hundreds of professors and administrators who are distorting or corrupting the education of young people. Nearly all institutions on this list need to pick up the pace of reform. By the same token, many schools near the bottom of our rankings employ some gifted educators with no agenda but student learning. Mark Hopkins, president of Williams College in the early nineteenth century, was correct when he defined education as “a teacher at one end of a log and a student at the other.” With guidance and a little luck, students can find sound teachers at most institutions, and they can find healthier subcultures (for example, certain athletic teams) to insulate them from an ideologically suffocating campus culture. But the purpose of an evaluative tool like the City Journal College Rankings is not to dwell on exceptions but to communicate probabilities. Our conviction is that, on balance, students will have a better shot at obtaining a sound education at schools rated highly on our list.
Our rankings provide young people (and their parents) with a radically different way of thinking about which school to attend. We also hope to encourage colleges and universities to reform themselves. Meaningful change in higher education will happen only when prospective students begin holding colleges and universities accountable through informed decision-making and “voting with their feet.” By empowering students with a holistic, transparent, and data-driven ranking system, we want to facilitate American higher education’s return to its fundamental mission: fostering rigorous intellectual inquiry, preparing students for engaged citizenship, and benefiting society through genuine learning.
John D. Sailer is the director of higher education policy and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Kevin Wallsten is a professor of political science at California State University, Long Beach, and an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute, where his work focuses on higher education reform and the City Journal College Rankings.
Photo: Jon Lovette / Photodisc via Getty Images