2025 College Rankings

Bowdoin College is best known historically as the home of Joshua Chamberlain, the legendary Civil War general who led the defense of Little Round Top in the Battle of Gettysburg. In more recent years, the school has not employed a professoriate to rival Chamberlain’s mettle and good sense. Instead, Bowdoin, like many schools with distinguished pasts, has become captive to an administration pushing ideology over education.

Administrative activism is prevalent at Bowdoin. The school has not adopted institutional neutrality, and it shows. A look at the school’s commitments reveals numerous nonacademic fixations: an environmental-protection commitment and land acknowledgments, for instance. Bowdoin also filed a brief in support of affirmative action in the Students for Fair Admissions case at the Supreme Court. The school has stood firm in one area, however: it has rejected calls to participate in the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, which, especially in the last two years, has become a cause célèbre among faculty and students.

Students at Bowdoin do not report unusually high levels of self-censorship. According to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), 67 percent of Bowdoin students are “very” or at least “somewhat” comfortable expressing their views to other students on a controversial political topic in campus common spaces. The school falls into the middle of the pack for student ideological pluralism and political tolerance. According to FIRE, since 2019 no attempts have been made at Bowdoin to de-platform a campus speaker.

Faculty ideological pluralism is a mixed bag. Students tell FIRE that they place faculty members toward the liberal end of the ideological continuum—on average, 2.2 on a 7-point scale, where 1 is “very liberal” and 7 is “very conservative.” That said, Bowdoin faculty’s political leanings are somewhat more eclectic than those of professors at peer institutions. In the 2023–24 election cycle, 5 percent of faculty campaign contributions went to conservative or Republican causes. Approximately 1 percent of faculty belong to Heterodox Academy, and about the same percentage belong to the Academic Freedom Alliance—two organizations that promote free inquiry on campus.

Anti-Semitism is a persistent problem on Bowdoin’s campus, though the administration’s response to it has not been as haphazard as at many other schools. The administration has cracked down on encampments. In the spring of 2025, for example, campus police booted a Students for Justice in Palestine encampment without much delay, telling those disrupting campus life that they were “on a path to no longer be Bowdoin students.”

Bowdoin’s curriculum is poor. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) gives the school an F 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. Though it has played a role in the nation’s history, Bowdoin does not require that its students take history or government courses to graduate. It does, however, mandate that they take courses focusing on DEI.

Bowdoin graduates, like those of many other small liberal arts colleges, underperform in terms of median income—by about $6,000—ten years after initial enrollment, compared with what would be expected based on data from SAT scores and Pell Grant recipients. Both its retention and six-year graduation rates, however, meet expectations.