2025 College Rankings

Carnegie Mellon University was founded by Andrew Carnegie, the great industrialist and Scottish immigrant who rose to become one of America’s richest men. It’s not difficult to imagine how dismayed he might be by the state of his namesake institution today.

Carnegie Mellon’s administration is devoted to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives. The university employs a sizable DEI bureaucracy—more than three staff members per 1,000 students at a school of roughly 16,000. Around 7 percent of faculty job postings require DEI statements. For these efforts, Carnegie Mellon has received the Higher Education Excellence in Diversity (HEED) award two years running, a distinction that is no point of pride. This year, the federal government announced an investigation into the university’s DEI practices.

The administration is given to other forms of activism as well, impeding its ability to educate. Land acknowledgments, encouragement of pronoun usage, and environmental pledges are routine at Carnegie Mellon. The university filed a brief supporting affirmative action in the Students for Fair Admissions Supreme Court case. Though it has formally adopted a policy of institutional neutrality, that hasn’t prevented it from wading into various public controversies.

Its commitment to free speech is similarly weak. Carnegie Mellon operates a bias-response system that monitors speech deemed offensive. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) gives the university a “yellow” speech code rating, indicating that its policies are vulnerable to abuse and may chill open expression.

Carnegie Mellon’s faculty form a predictable ideological bloc: liberal. On a 7-point ideological scale where 1 is “very liberal” and 7 “very conservative,” students place their professors at an average of 2.4. In the 2023–24 election cycle, less than 2 percent of faculty campaign contributions went to conservatives or Republicans. Very few professors belong to organizations such as the Academic Freedom Alliance or Heterodox Academy, both of which promote intellectual diversity and free inquiry in the classroom.

Still, students at Carnegie Mellon report relatively little pressure to self-censor, whether on campus or in the classroom. The school ranks in the top 15 on our student free speech index, and 70 percent of students tell FIRE that they are “rarely” or “never” personally offended by classmates’ viewpoints; students tend to be relatively politically tolerant and display a broader range of ideological perspectives than is typical at peer institutions.

Carnegie Mellon’s curriculum fares decently on our metrics. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) gives the university 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. The school rightly mandates that students take courses in history or government—a welcome expectation—though this is offset by a requirement to complete DEI-focused coursework as well.

Carnegie Mellon graduates are generally well positioned after leaving campus. On average, it takes students less than two years to recoup the cost of their education, well below our overall average of 2.3 years. Median earnings ten years after enrollment exceed expectations by roughly $23,500. However, the school produces significantly fewer Ph.D.s than predicted, based on SAT scores and Pell Grant data—suggesting that Carnegie Mellon may deliver the greatest value to those seeking an undergraduate degree only.