2025 College Rankings

Boston College’s administration actively suppresses free speech. In fact, we rank it in our bottom 5 percent, lower even than its neighbor Harvard University, which also has a serious free-speech problem. In almost every test of free speech, BC fails. Students tell the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) that they have little faith in the administration’s willingness to protect free expression on campus. Only 28 percent of students say that it is “extremely” or “very” likely that the administration would defend a speaker’s right to express views in a controversy over offensive speech. On the whole, FIRE gives BC a “red” rating in its speech code rankings—its lowest possible score. The school maintains a bias-response system, which suppresses free speech, and it has not endorsed the Chicago Principles, an increasingly adopted set of tenets that affirm free speech.

Unsurprisingly, BC is also home to a coercive, activist administration. Here again, we find the school near the bottom of our rankings. BC has not adopted institutional neutrality, and that lapse in judgment is reflected in how the school intervenes in controversy and inevitably reveals its bias. For instance, in the Students for Fair Admissions case at the Supreme Court, BC filed an amicus brief in favor of racial preferences. When radical anti-Semitic activists demanded last year that the school engage in the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, the administration remained silent, refusing to denounce this absurd demand.

Yet BC’s student body offers cause for encouragement, as far as intellectual diversity. Among all the schools we studied, BC has the most balanced ideological distribution of students: it currently enrolls 1.3 liberal students for every conservative student. This ideological diversity is present in campus clubs as well. There are an equal number of liberal and conservative student organizations.

The faculty at BC is also relatively diverse. Students rank faculty members, on average, very close to “moderate” on an ideological continuum. More than 1 percent of faculty, a large portion comparatively, are members of Heterodox Academy, an organization that seeks to protect free inquiry on campus.

Boston College’s curriculum is middling. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) gives it a C in its What Will They Learn? ratings, which assign letter grades based on how many of seven core subjects are required in the core curriculum or general education program. The school mandates that students take courses focusing on DEI to graduate while neglecting to require that they learn basic civics or U.S. history. ACTA does identify one area of excellence among Boston College’s institutes: the Clough Center for Constitutional Democracy, which hosts lectures and conferences and supports research efforts for both faculty and students in the study of the American constitutional order.

Boston College is weaker than peers on some measures of outcomes. Its graduation and retention rates lag slightly behind what would be expected, based on SAT scores and Pell Grants received by entrants. The time that it takes students, on average, to pay back the cost of their education tends to be longer—2.8 years, as compared with the overall average of 2.3 years.