2025 College Rankings

Pennsylvania State University is a massive school and a storied powerhouse in sports—but overall, it is mediocre. The school has not succumbed to all the malignant trends in higher education, but it has not risen above them, either.

Penn State’s administration is not completely dominated by activists. The school has embraced some unfortunate causes—it allows for preferred pronouns in bios, for example—but on the whole, it has avoided the worst forms of activism. The school’s DEI bureaucracy is not overwhelming. That said, DEI does have a presence on campus. Twenty percent of faculty job postings require a DEI statement, and the school employs slightly more than one DEI employee for every 1,000 undergraduates, significant at a school with more than 40,000 undergraduates.

The school’s record on free speech is poor. Students are ambivalent about the administration’s support for free expression on campus. The school also employs a bias-response system, which is designed to police the airing of opinions that some may consider offensive. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) gives the school a “yellow” speech code rating, meaning that its policies could easily be abused to suppress speech.

Students at Penn State are among the most ideologically balanced of any school that we studied. There are roughly equal numbers of liberal and conservative students, and the relative number of student political organizations is fairly balanced as well. Penn State students are more or less tolerant of political views other than their own. On the whole, students tell FIRE that they have a high level of willingness to hear out controversial speakers on campus, whether they come from the left or the right. Students are more comfortable expressing themselves than at many other schools. According to FIRE, only 44 percent of students say that they censor themselves at least once a month, a relatively low number by our metrics.

The curriculum at Penn State needs reform. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) gives the school a D 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 does not require its students to complete courses in government or U.S. history to graduate.

The school is a mixed bag for graduates. Though The Princeton Review ranks its alumni network among the top 20 nationwide for public schools, graduates do not always rise to the top of their fields. In fact, median annual earnings ten years after initial enrollment underperform expectations by over $2,000, based on data from SAT scores and Pell Grant recipients. It also takes a long time to pay back the cost of the education: on average, 4.1 years, well over our 2.3-year average. That said, graduation and retention rates are higher than expectations. The six-year graduation rate is 83 percent, three points higher than predicted; and the retention rate is 91 percent, about a point higher.