2025 College Rankings

Colgate University’s first building was constructed by faculty members and students with local rocks drawn from a nearby quarry. Over time, those firm foundations have been worn away by Colgate’s embrace of destructive academic trends that are eroding great schools across the country.

The school’s administration is strongly activist. Colgate has taken on many commitments extraneous to its educational mission—environmental protection pledges, land acknowledgments, and encouragement of pronoun usage, to name a few. The school also has a thriving Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) bureaucracy, with about 3.5 employees per 1,000 undergraduates. More than 75 percent of faculty job postings require a DEI statement. That said, Colgate has recently adopted institutional neutrality, a welcome sign.

Colgate has a bad record on free speech. Overall, students are less than convinced that the administration values free expression. The school also employs a bias-response system, designed to police the airing of opinions that some may consider offensive. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) gives the school a “red” speech code rating, meaning that its policies explicitly restrict speech.

The faculty is unbalanced in its views. Students, when asked to place their professors on an ideological continuum, where 1 is “very liberal” and 7 is “very conservative,” put them at 2.5. The vast majority of faculty campaign donations in the 2023–24 election cycle went to liberal or Democratic causes. That said, a relatively high number of faculty members, at least by our metrics, belong to Heterodox Academy, an organization that encourages free inquiry on campus.

The student body is fairly ideologically diverse and open-minded. There are 2.8 liberal students for every conservative, and the makeup of student political organizations is relatively balanced. Students generally do not feel a need to censor themselves and are tolerant of their peers’ opinions. In fact, only 8 percent of students tell FIRE that they are “very often” or “fairly often” personally offended by perspectives shared by classmates. Colgate falls on the upper end of our rankings for the comfort with which students express themselves in informal situations on campus.

The curriculum at Colgate is in terrible shape. 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. The school requires its students to take classes in DEI to graduate but neglects more academically relevant subjects, such as history or government. ACTA does identify one area of excellence: the Center for Freedom and Western Civilization, which sponsors lectures and other programs to advance the idea that Western civilization has a universal appeal.

Colgate is a mixed bag in terms of the value that it offers students. On the one hand, The Princeton Review ranks its alumni network among the top 20 nationwide for private schools, and its graduates tend to be successful in their careers. On the other hand, Colgate underperforms in its six-year graduation and retention rates based on data from SAT scores and Pell Grant recipients. It takes, on average, 1.9 years to pay back the cost of education, slightly less than our overall 2.3-year average.