2025 College Rankings

Middlebury College is a venerable New England institution that in recent years has compromised its intellectual reputation by embracing activist agendas. The decline has been both swift and pronounced.

The school’s unusually large Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) bureaucracy is one indication. Middlebury employs nearly seven DEI staffers for every 1,000 undergraduates, and every faculty job listing requires a DEI statement. A Chief Diversity Officer oversees the operation.

The administration is also deeply engaged in other forms of activism. Environmental pledges, land acknowledgments, encouraged pronoun usage, and similar distractions from the educational mission abound. The administration has also struggled to manage more disruptive activism. In spring 2024, when protesters erected an unauthorized encampment on campus to promote radical anti-Israel views, the college allowed it to remain for a full week, in violation of school policy. The demonstration ended only after the school reached a settlement with the protesters—an outcome widely viewed as a capitulation. The federal government is now investigating Middlebury for its handling of campus anti-Semitism.

Middlebury’s administration has an abysmal record on free speech. The college employs a bias-response system designed to monitor and discourage speech that some may find offensive. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) gives Middlebury a “red” speech code rating, indicating that its policies explicitly restrict expression.

Students rank among the least politically tolerant of any campus studied. The student body is overwhelmingly liberal—there are nearly eight liberal students for every conservative—and far more willing to ban controversial right-wing speakers than left-wing ones. Attempts to silence speakers have occurred multiple times in recent years. In 2019, students petitioned the administration to cancel a lecture by philosopher and parliamentarian Ryszard Legutko, and the administration capitulated. (Other students later defied the administration to hold the lecture “underground.”) In a more notorious incident in 2017, student protesters disrupted a lecture by political scientist Charles Murray, resorting to violence and injuring a professor in the process.

Middlebury’s curriculum is abysmal. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) gives the college 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. One notable exception is the Alexander Hamilton Forum, which hosts a public lecture series and fellowship program focused on the foundations of free institutions, the First Amendment, economic liberty, human flourishing, and the role of liberal education in civic life.

Like many small liberal arts colleges, Middlebury also falls short in serving its graduates economically. On average, it takes 3.5 years to recoup the cost of a Middlebury education—well above the overall average of 2.3 years. Graduates typically do not earn high salaries in the decade following graduation: median annual earnings ten years after enrollment underperform expectations by nearly $9,000, based on SAT scores and Pell Grant recipient data. One bright spot is the college’s graduation rate, which exceeds predictions based on those same inputs.