2025 College Rankings

Trinity College was founded as an alternative to Yale University in the nineteenth century. Unfortunately, like so many historic, small New England colleges, it has embraced trends at odds with its foundational mission of educating students in the liberal arts. The school’s commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives is extreme. It boasts a relatively large DEI bureaucracy: more than eight employees per 1,000 students. Every faculty job listing requires a diversity statement. For its efforts, Trinity, for the last two years, has won the Higher Education Excellence in Diversity (HEED) award, a distinction that does no honor to the school. Trinity is evasive about questions surrounding its DEI commitments. In 2025, the school fired a spokesperson after she ignored a directive from superiors and answered a media inquiry about diversity at the school. The administration is beholden to numerous other activist impulses. Trinity weighed in on the Students for Fair Admissions case at the Supreme Court in support of affirmative action. The school has not adopted institutional neutrality, even as many of its peers have decided to stop taking stands so frequently on matters of public controversy.

In contrast to its fervent activism, Trinity’s support for campus free speech is tepid. Students report to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) that they are generally confident that the administration values speech or that it would defend the right of a speaker to express controversial opinions. But the school has adopted a bias-response system, designed to police the airing of opinions that some may consider offensive. FIRE gives the school a “yellow” speech code rating, meaning that its policies could easily be abused to suppress speech.

The faculty at Trinity is among the least ideologically diverse of any school that we studied. Students, when asked to place their professors on an ideological continuum, where 1 is “very liberal” and 7 is “very conservative,” put them, on average, at 2.5. A negligible number of faculty members belong to organizations that promote free inquiry on campus.

By contrast, students at Trinity are among the most ideologically diverse. For every conservative student, there are 1.5 liberal ones and an equal number of liberal and conservative student political organizations. Even with the relatively balanced ideological makeup, students are anxious about speaking freely. According to FIRE, 57 percent of students censor themselves at least once per month. That said, Trinity students do not generally behave with hostility toward those who express their opinions in campus speeches. There have been no attempts to de-platform a speaker in the last five years.

The curriculum at Trinity performs poorly on our metrics. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) gives the school 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. Trinity requires its students to take DEI-focused classes to graduate but neglects more academically relevant subjects, such as history or civics.

Trinity is a risky investment in terms of post-graduate earnings. On average, it takes students 3.4 years to pay back the cost of their education, longer than our overall average of 2.3 years. Six-year graduation and retention rates fall short of expectations, based on data from SAT scores and Pell Grant recipients. But Trinity graduates tend to succeed in their careers. Median annual earnings ten years after initial enrollment overperform expectations by over $13,000.