2025 College Rankings

Swarthmore College is one of the oldest coeducational institutions in the country; but like many American schools with distinguished pedigrees, it is no longer what it once was.

The college has fully embraced Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives, maintaining a sizable DEI bureaucracy—nearly 2.5 employees per 1,000 undergraduates, led by a Chief Diversity Officer. More than 40 percent of advertised faculty positions require a DEI statement. The school has received the Higher Education Excellence in Diversity (HEED) award, an ignominious distinction, in our view.

Faculty ideological pluralism is similarly lacking. We rank Swarthmore nearly in the bottom third nationwide. Students place faculty members at an average of 2.7 on a 7-point ideological scale, where 1 is “very liberal” and 7 is “very conservative.” In the 2023–24 election cycle, 100 percent of faculty campaign donations went to liberal or Democratic causes.

Swarthmore’s administration shows little respect for free speech—a reflection of its activist culture. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) gives the college a “yellow” speech code rating, indicating that its policies are prone to misuse. This judgment is reinforced by the school’s use of a bias response system, which, though nominally designed to protect expression, often serves to suppress it.

Students, too, form an ideological monoculture that discourages dissent. Swarthmore ranks in the bottom 15 percent for ideological diversity, with a liberal-to-conservative student ratio of nearly 10 to 1. It also ranks in the bottom 5 percent for student support for free speech. According to FIRE, nearly 15 percent of students report being “very” or “fairly” often personally offended by classmates’ opinions.

The curriculum reflects these imbalances. Though often considered one of the “Little Ivies,” Swarthmore falls short in both breadth and rigor. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) gives the college 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. We rank Swarthmore in the bottom 25 percent for classroom experience, partly because political activism frequently intrudes on academics. A telling example: many professors canceled class in response to the outcome of the 2024 presidential election.

Swarthmore’s administration mishandled the wave of radical anti-Semitic protests that followed Hamas’s October 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel. Even before these events, the campus was not a welcoming environment for Jewish students. The college hosts an active Faculty for Justice in Palestine chapter and a relatively large number of faculty who support an academic boycott of Israel. According to the AMCHA Initiative, Swarthmore has recorded more than 230 anti-Semitic incidents per 1,000 Jewish students, one of the highest rates among the schools that we studied.

So it was little surprise when student protesters set up an encampment in 2024 that lasted 32 days—one of the longest of any campus—and disbanded entirely on the protesters’ terms. In response to the administration’s failure to address radical anti-Semitic incidents during that period, the Department of Education announced in 2025 that it is investigating Swarthmore.

Swarthmore graduates fare no better than those of many peer institutions. The average time to repay the cost of a Swarthmore education is just under two years, in the middle of our rankings. Median earnings ten years after initial enrollment are over $8,600 below expectations—a disappointing figure, though not the worst among the schools that we evaluated.