2025 College Rankings

Columbia University has been the red-hot center of academic controversy over the last two years. The school, long considered among the best in the country, instead became an exemplar of everything that has gone wrong in American higher education.

The school’s administration failed in almost every imaginable way to confront the radical anti-Semitic protests that arrived on campus in the wake of Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel. Extremists in the faculty and the student body ran circles around the administration, camping out on Columbia’s campus, harassing Jewish students in classrooms and public areas, and even resorting to violence in some cases. Police were called in numerous times; yet the protesters continued to disrupt the university’s ability to function. Unable to restore order on campus, Columbia’s president, Minouche Shafik, resigned in disgrace. Still, the protests continued. More recently, Columbia became involved in a struggle with the federal government over its funding, as the school’s inability to cope with its anti-Semitism problem comes to a head.

Columbia’s administration has failed in other ways, too—most notably, in its embrace of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) ideology. The school maintains a sizable DEI bureaucracy, with nearly four employees per 1,000 undergraduates. It has received the Higher Education Excellence in Diversity (HEED) award many times, a sign of its deep devotion to the diversity regime. The school filed a brief in support of affirmative action in the Students for Fair Admissions case at the Supreme Court, a sign that the administration values diversity over merit in admissions.

The school has largely failed to safeguard free speech. Only 20 percent of students tell the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) that the school values free expression. Columbia has adopted a bias-response system, designed to police the airing of opinions that some may consider offensive, even as it has also endorsed the Chicago Principles, which promote free inquiry among students and faculty. FIRE gives the school a “yellow” speech code rating, meaning that its policies could easily be abused to suppress speech.

Students at Columbia are unbalanced in their views. For every conservative student at Columbia, there are about five liberal ones. For the most part, students are not politically tolerant, especially of campus speakers whose views don’t comport with the reigning left-wing orthodoxy on campus. Indeed, attempts at speaker de-platformings are somewhat common. Last year, for example, students even interrupted an event hosting former First Lady Hillary Clinton over her views on foreign policy. The year before, activists disrupted another lecture featuring Clinton with similar chants. Columbia also happens to be one of the worst environments for student self-expression: 65 percent of students tell FIRE that they self-censor in the classroom at least once a month.

Despite all these shortcomings, the curriculum at Columbia performs better than most on our metrics. The school is known for its academic core, and 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. This distinction should be viewed with caution, however, as many argue that the vaunted “core” has been politicized. ACTA identifies two areas of excellence available to students: the Center on Law and Liberty promotes study in “freedom, threats to its existence, and legal protections designed to ensure its survival”; and the Morningside Institute sponsors dinner seminars, lectures, conferences, and cultural outings to help students at Columbia build intellectual friendships and engage in conversations about ideas.

Columbia often proves a worthy investment in terms of graduate earnings. It takes, on average, less than a year to pay back the cost of the education, much shorter than our 2.3-year overall average. Graduates tend to do well early in their careers. Median annual earnings ten years after initial enrollment overperform expectations by over $7,000, based on data from SAT scores and Pell Grant recipients. The school slightly overperforms expectations in its retention and six-year graduation rates.