2025 College Rankings

Brandeis University was founded at a time when many elite universities discriminated against Jewish students. Since then, the school has maintained its Jewish identity, though not without controversy.

The most prominent of these controversies occurred in 2024, when the school’s president, Ronald Liebowitz, announced his departure, following disagreement over his firm reaction to the wave of anti-Semitic protests that had reached the university. Liebowitz cut institutional ties with the school’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter and invited anyone who shared its repugnant beliefs to transfer. A majority of faculty vigorously opposed this approach.

Though its administration is not heavily activist, Brandeis does have a fixation on protecting the environment—a laudable goal, perhaps, on its own, but not when it interferes with the educational mission. The school maintains a large Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) bureaucracy, with nearly six employees per 1,000 students. About 14 percent of faculty job postings require a diversity statement.

Brandeis’s support for free speech is stronger than that of many other schools, though it could be stronger still. Only 22 percent of students tell the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) that it is “extremely” or “very” clear that the administration supports free speech. FIRE gives the school a “yellow” speech code rating, meaning that its policies could easily be abused to suppress speech. On the plus side, Brandeis has endorsed the Chicago Principles, which promote the protection of free expression on campus.

Brandeis’s faculty lacks balance but shows some signs of commitment to freedom of inquiry. Students perceive it as overwhelmingly liberal. When asked to place their professors on an ideological continuum, where 1 is “very liberal” and 7 is “very conservative,” they put faculty members, on average, at 2.5. Ninety-two percent of faculty campaign donations went to liberal or Democratic causes in the 2023–24 election cycle. However, about 2.5 percent of faculty members, a large number by our metrics, belong to Heterodox Academy, an organization that promotes free inquiry on campus.

Students are unbalanced in their views. For every conservative student, there are roughly 16 liberals. Unsurprisingly, most students at Brandeis are not tolerant of views contrary to their own; this is most clearly reflected in students’ attitudes toward campus speakers. On the whole, students say that they are much more tolerant of left-wing than right-wing speakers, and a large number, 35 percent, say that shouting down a controversial speaker is “sometimes” or “always” acceptable. Self-censorship is a major problem: more than 60 percent of students tell FIRE that they do so at least once a month.

The curriculum at Brandeis is poor. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) gives the school a D 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 emphasize U.S. history or government classes in its graduation requirements.

Brandeis is a mixed bag for graduates. Most tend to succeed early in their careers. Median annual earnings ten years after initial enrollment underperform expectations—set by data from SAT scores and Pell Grant recipients—by over $12,000. Still, the school has a hard time getting all its students to the graduation finish line. The same data show that Brandeis underperforms expected retention and six-year graduation rates. It takes, on average, 2.1 years to pay back the cost of the education, about on par with our 2.3-year overall average.