2025 College Rankings

Amherst College is a place where many students don’t feel comfortable expressing their views. According to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), 65 percent of students report feeling “very” or at least “somewhat” uncomfortable sharing their opinions on controversial topics during in-class discussions. Nearly half say that they feel the same about expressing political views in campus common spaces, such as the quad or dining hall.

Given the pervasive anxiety around speaking up, it’s unsurprising that Amherst students also tend to be politically intolerant—and the intolerance skews sharply leftward. Students told FIRE that they are far more willing to bar right-wing speakers from campus than left-wing ones. Worse, many are willing to act on that impulse. According to FIRE, 71 percent say that it’s acceptable to shout down an unpopular speaker, 47 percent say that it can be acceptable to block others from attending, and 27 percent believe that using violence in such situations can be justified.

The atmosphere is even worse among faculty. We rank Amherst dead last for ideological diversity among professors. Students rate their faculty, on average, at 1.9 on a 1-to-7 ideological scale, where 1 is “very liberal” and 7 is “very conservative”—the most left-leaning faculty of any school that we examined. That perception is confirmed by faculty campaign contributions. In the 2023–24 election cycle, not a single dollar went to conservative or Republican causes; every contribution supported liberal or Democratic candidates.

Administrative support for free speech at Amherst is lackluster. FIRE gives the school a “yellow” speech code rating, indicating that its policies could easily be used to suppress speech. Students seem to agree: only 20 percent say that it is “extremely” or “very” likely that the administration would defend a speaker’s right to express controversial views.

Amherst has not endorsed the Chicago Principles, which affirm free speech, and it has also implemented a bias-response system.

The school maintains a sizable Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) bureaucracy, which contributes to the stifling intellectual climate. Amherst has roughly 14 DEI staffers per 1,000 students—a striking number for a college with fewer than 2,000 undergraduates.

Amherst graduates tend to underperform slightly in median earnings ten years after enrollment, based on expectations from incoming students’ SAT scores and Pell Grant status. However, they repay the cost of their education relatively quickly—typically in about 1.6 years, well below the national average of 2.3 years.