2025 College Rankings

Colby College is one of many small liberal arts colleges in New England founded in the early nineteenth century. Like too many of those schools, it has fallen victim to some of the worst trends in higher education.

Colby’s administration displays a disappointing lack of support for free speech. It employs a bias-response system, designed to police the airing of opinions that some may consider offensive. Only 22 percent of students tell the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) that it is “extremely” or “very” clear that the administration protects speech on campus. About the same percentage voice confidence that the administration would defend a speaker’s ability to express himself in the event of controversy. Overall, FIRE gives the school a “yellow” speech code rating, meaning that its policies could easily be abused to suppress speech.

Colby’s administration is tied to a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) bureaucracy and has dabbled in other forms of activism as well. The DEI department, while small in comparison with those of many other schools, is significant. At Colby, there are 1.3 DEI employees for every 1,000 students, and the school employs a Chief Diversity Officer. As for other forms of activism, Colby signaled its preference for diversity over merit by filing an amicus brief supporting affirmative action in the Students for Fair Admissions case at the Supreme Court.

The faculty tend to be overwhelmingly liberal, and they are not hesitant to share their opinions with students. When asked to place their professors on an ideological continuum, where 1 is “very liberal” and 7 is “very conservative,” students put them at 2.5, on average. The vast majority of faculty donations in the 2023–24 election cycle went to liberal or Democratic causes, and an insignificant number of faculty belong to organizations that promote free inquiry on campus.

Colby’s student body is among the most liberal of any school that we studied. For every conservative, there are about ten liberals. That massive imbalance reveals itself in student tolerance for campus speakers, who, while generally welcome, are much more welcome if they are liberals. That said, there have been no attempts to de-platform a speaker at Colby in the last five years. Students, however, are generally wary of expressing themselves freely: 45 percent of students tell FIRE that they censor themselves at least once a month.

Colby’s curriculum could be better. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) gives the school 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 the school requires that students study DEI to graduate, while at the same time neglecting that they learn more pertinent subjects, such as U.S. history and civics.

Colby may not offer a good value for the investment. On average, it takes 1.4 years to pay back the cost of education, comfortably under our overall 2.3-year average. But retention and six-year graduation rates fall below predictions based on SAT scores and Pell Grant recipients. The graduation rate, for example, is predicted to be 92 percent, when in reality, it is only 88 percent. And median annual career earnings ten years after initial enrollment slightly underperform predictions based on the same data.