2025 College Rankings

Carleton College’s administration is steeped in activism. Of the 100 schools we studied, we rank it second to last in this category. The college has embraced many of the worst trends in higher education—land acknowledgments, encouragement of pronoun usage, and sweeping environmental commitments, among others. It filed an amicus brief in support of affirmative action in the Students for Fair Admissions Supreme Court case, signaling a clear preference for diversity over merit. Carleton has not adopted a policy of institutional neutrality, leaving it free to wade into public controversies far afield from its educational mission.

Its approach to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) is similarly troubling. Every faculty job posting requires a DEI statement, and the college supports a sprawling DEI bureaucracy, with nearly six DEI staff per 1,000 students.

Carleton’s commitment to free speech is lackluster. The school maintains a bias-response system, designed to monitor and discourage speech that some may find offensive. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) gives Carleton a “yellow” speech code rating, indicating that its policies are prone to abuse and may suppress open expression.

The faculty is somewhat more ideologically diverse than one might expect, given the administration’s activist posture. Students generally view their professors as liberal, placing them at an average of 2.7 on a 7-point ideological scale where 1 is “very liberal” and 7 “very conservative.” That said, a noteworthy number of faculty are affiliated with organizations that promote free expression, suggesting at least some internal resistance to the prevailing orthodoxy. More than 5 percent of Carleton faculty, for instance, are members of Heterodox Academy, a very high figure, by our standards—indeed, the second-highest among all the schools we studied.

The student body is not especially ideologically diverse. There are nearly seven liberal students for every conservative, and there are four liberal political groups and just one for conservatives. A troubling number of students report self-censorship: 54 percent tell FIRE that they withhold their views at least once a month.

On curriculum, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) gives the college a B 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. But Carleton mandates that students take DEI-focused courses to graduate, and it neglects more academically essential subjects like history and government.

The school also offers poor value for the cost of education. On average, it takes graduates 3.8 years to recoup their educational expenses—far above our overall average of 2.3 years. Both the six-year graduation rate and first-year retention rate fall short of expectations based on SAT scores and Pell Grant data. Ten years after enrollment, median annual earnings underperform projections by nearly $11,000.