2025 College Rankings

Massachusetts Institute of Technology serves its graduates’ career ambitions well at a bargain price. We rank it number 1 overall in terms of the time it takes to pay back the cost of education: in general, less than three months. It can also significantly boost graduates’ careers. An MIT education can also greatly affect median earnings, which overperform predicted median income ten years after enrollment by over $44,000. The school produces a disproportionate number of Ph.D.s, especially considering expectations based on SAT scores and the Pell Grant received by entrants. It likely helps that its alumni network, which The Princeton Review ranks in its top 20 nationwide for private schools, aids many young graduates in finding their way in science and technology.

That said, MIT underperforms in many other important areas. Its professoriate, for instance, is ideologically homogenous: We place MIT in the bottom 20 percent for faculty ideological pluralism. When surveyed by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), students place faculty members, on average, toward the liberal end of the ideological continuum, with an average of 2.6 on a 7-point scale, where 1 is “very liberal” and 7 is “very conservative.” And 1 percent or less of faculty members are Academic Freedom Alliance or Heterodox Academy members, organizations dedicated to fostering an atmosphere of free inquiry on college campuses.

Administrative support for free speech is lackluster. FIRE gives MIT a “yellow” rating, meaning that its policies are vague or can easily be manipulated to suppress unpopular opinions. Less than 20 percent of students tell the same organization that it is “extremely” or “very” clear that MIT protects free speech on campus. That same number of students report that it is “extremely” or “very” likely that the administration would defend a speaker’s right to express his views in a controversy over offensive speech—a disappointing showing. The school maintains a bias-response system, which, while nominally intended to protect speech, actually suppresses the free expression of opinions. MIT has, however, endorsed the Chicago Principles, designed to protect free expression—perhaps demonstrating some institutional awareness that free speech is valuable. But that awareness goes only so far: last year, an alumni group petitioned the school to adopt an institutional neutrality policy, to no avail.

The curriculum at MIT has shortcomings. 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. Though the school removed requirements for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) statements in its faculty job postings last year, it still mandates that students take at least one DEI-focused course to graduate. MIT maintains a sprawling DEI bureaucracy. It has more than ten DEI employees per 1,000 undergraduates, a huge proportion for a school with fewer than 5,000 undergraduates. Still, the school requires that students submit SAT or ACT scores in the admissions process, a sign that—in this regard, at least—merit is more important than diversity.

Perhaps the school’s most notable failure in recent years is its inability to deal with the problem of radical anti-Semitism on campus. The AMCHA Initiative has recorded more than 150 anti-Semitic incidents for every 1,000 Jewish students, among the top 20 highest rates in any school that we studied. MIT has an active Faculty for Justice in Palestine chapter. In recent years, the school has been subject to congressional investigation for radical anti-Semitism. Its president, Sally Kornbluth, was called before Congress in 2023 to testify about the school’s efforts—or lack thereof—to protect Jewish students, and she gave a performance widely regarded as unconvincing. Not long afterward, seemingly in confirmation of that perception, anti-Israel student protesters set up an encampment that lasted 19 days before the school cleared it out.