2025 College Rankings

Boston University is one of the largest employers in its home city and enjoys the benefits of a vibrant university town. But overall, it is a middling institution.

BU’s administration is not especially activist, though it hasn’t taken many commendable steps toward reform, either. The school has not adopted institutional neutrality, for example, which would mark it as intentionally impartial. On the plus side, it has not made many commitments extraneous to its mission. BU does not dabble in land acknowledgments, preferred pronouns, or many other trendy causes observed at other New England schools.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives, while they play a role in the administrative bureaucracy, are less prevalent than at many peer institutions: only 14 percent of faculty job postings require a diversity statement, and there are only about 1.5 DEI employees for every 1,000 students. BU was for several years home to the Center for Antiracist Research, a perch for the controversial “antiracist” public figure Ibram X. Kendi. The center’s closure was announced earlier this year, and Kendi left the school.

BU’s administration has proven itself no friend to free speech. Though the school has adopted the Chicago Principles, designed to safeguard free inquiry on campus, it has also implemented a bias-response system, which does the opposite, squelching “offending” views. Students generally are ambivalent about the administration’s commitment to protecting speech and are not confident that, in the event of controversy, the administration would protect the right of a speaker to express himself. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) gives BU a “yellow” speech code rating, meaning that its policies could easily be exploited to suppress speech.

Faculty are not ideologically diverse. Students generally perceive them as left-leaning, and when asked to place faculty on an ideological continuum, they tend to mark them toward the “very liberal” end of the scale. Nearly every faculty dollar donated in the 2023–24 election cycle went to Democratic or liberal causes. A negligible number of professors are members of the Academic Freedom Alliance or Heterodox Academy, two organizations that encourage free inquiry in the classroom.

Students are not generally tolerant of viewpoints other than their own. For example, students are far more willing to say that right-wing speakers should not be allowed on campus than to say the same of left-wing speakers. Students also generally believe that disrupting campus speech is acceptable behavior: 75 percent tell FIRE that it is acceptable to shout down a speaker, 71 percent say that blocking a campus speech can be acceptable, and 45 percent say that it can be acceptable to use violence in these situations. With attitudes like these, it’s no wonder that student life at BU is generally considered unpleasant. Both The Princeton Review and Niche, the online college ranker, give BU poor marks for its quality of life and student happiness.

BU’s curriculum is also a disappointment. 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 does not require its students to learn history or civics to graduate—but it does mandate that they take courses focusing on DEI.

A BU degree is a mixed bag for graduates. It takes students an average of 2.6 years to pay back the cost of their education, longer than the overall average of 2.3 years. Median earnings ten years after initial enrollment slightly underperform predicted rates, based on SAT scores and Pell Grant recipient data. BU’s retention rate is 94 percent, and its six-year graduation rate is 89 percent, on track with what our predictions suggest.