2025 College Rankings

Fordham University is the oldest Jesuit school in the Northeast. The school’s quality has suffered in recent years, though the decline has been gradual. The administration is not as politicized as at many other schools. Fordham has a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) bureaucracy, for example, but it is a small one, with fewer than one employee per 1,000 undergraduates. No faculty job postings require a diversity statement. The school did, however, file a brief in favor of affirmative action in the Students for Fair Admissions case at the Supreme Court, a sign that Fordham finds other ways to support the diversity regime.

Fordham’s support for free speech is poor. Only 15 percent of students tell the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) that it is “extremely” or “very” likely that the administration would defend a speaker’s right to express his views in an offensive-speech controversy. FIRE gives the school a “red” speech code rating, meaning that its policies explicitly restrict speech. The faculty at Fordham tends to be fairly liberal. Students, when asked to place their professors on an ideological continuum where 1 is “very liberal” and 7 is “very conservative,” put faculty members at 2.7, on average.

In the 2023–24 election cycle, 90 percent of faculty campaign donations went to liberal or Democratic causes—a large majority, to be sure, but more balanced than most other schools that we studied. A moderate number of Fordham faculty members belong to Heterodox Academy, an organization that promotes free inquiry on campus.

Despite the university’s poor administrative support for free speech, students report that they are comfortable expressing themselves on campus. Only 6 percent tell FIRE that they are “very” or “fairly” often personally offended by perspectives shared by classmates. With six liberal students to every conservative, perhaps there simply isn’t much political disagreement among the left-leaning student body. Fordham ranks in the top 20 schools on our student free speech index. Students also report feeling comfortable speaking during informal discussions, in-class discussions, or in conversations with professors, as well as on written assignments and social media: Less than 40 percent of students tell FIRE that they censor themselves at least once a month, a lower number than many other schools that we studied.

The curriculum at Fordham performs poorly on our metrics. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) gives the school a C 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 DEI-focused courses to graduate but neglects more academically serious subjects, such as history or government.

Fordham can be a risky investment. It takes, on average, 3.2 years to pay back the cost of the education, longer than our overall 2.3-year average. Six-year graduation and retention rates do not meet expectations set by data from SAT scores and Pell Grant recipients. For example, the school should have a 92 percent retention rate, but it is only 88 percent. Still, Fordham graduates often do well in their careers. The same data indicate that median annual earnings ten years after initial enrollment overperform expectations by about $4,500.