2025 College Rankings

Furman University is the oldest private institution of higher learning in South Carolina. It has a storied history; but in its present state, it rarely rises above mediocrity. Furman maintains a DEI bureaucracy, albeit a small one: a little more than one DEI employee per every 1,000 students. No faculty job postings require a diversity statement. In general, the school does not embrace too many activist causes—though it does dabble in land acknowledgments and the like, and its lack of institutional neutrality leaves the door open for it to adopt trendy positions.

Furman’s administration is worse when it comes to free speech. Though the school has adopted the Chicago Principles, which seek to protect free expression on campus, it has also implemented a bias-response system, which does the opposite. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) reports that students in general feel ambivalent about the administration’s commitment to protecting free speech on campus, especially in the event of controversy. FIRE gives Furman a “red” speech code rating, meaning that its policies explicitly restrict speech.

When asked to rank the faculty on an ideological continuum, where 1 is “very liberal” and 7 is “very conservative,” students mark most faculty at 2.8, according to FIRE. Nearly 98 percent of faculty campaign donations in the 2023–24 election cycle went to liberal or Democratic causes, and very few faculty are members of the Academic Freedom Alliance or Heterodox Academy, two organizations that encourage free inquiry in the classroom.

Students, however, are generally an ideologically diverse group. For example, there are 1.2 conservative students for every liberal student, and the ideological makeup of student political organizations is relatively balanced as well. On the whole, students are tolerant of political beliefs other than their own and willing to hear out both controversial left-wing and right-wing speakers on campus. There has been one recent attempt at de-platforming a speaker. In 2023, the conservative scholar Mary Eberstadt withdrew from an upcoming speaking engagement on campus after hostile protesters threatened another conservative campus speaker who had given a lecture shortly before her scheduled visit. Perhaps because of incidents such as these, students often feel that they need to speak in guarded tones. Furman ranks 88 out of 100 on our student free speech index.

The curriculum at Furman is mediocre. 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. Furman requires neither history nor civics courses for graduation; but it doesn’t require more activist-inflected courses, such as those focused on DEI, either. ACTA identifies one area of excellence: the Tocqueville Program, which offers courses, a lecture series, reading groups, and fellowship programs to advance debates over the philosophical questions surrounding political life.

Furman can be hard on students’ wallets after graduation. On average, it takes students 3.5 years to pay back the cost of their education—well above the overall average of 2.3 years. Graduates’ earnings ten years after initial enrollment, however, are roughly in line with expected earnings, based on SAT and Pell Grant data.