2025 College Rankings

The University of Connecticut boasts of having one of the best college basketball programs in the country. A closer look at the rest of the school’s offerings reveals that this is one of the few areas where the school truly excels. It suffers from its overzealous devotion to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives and a lackluster commitment to free speech.

DEI plays a key role in UConn’s administration. The school has a large DEI bureaucracy, with nearly five employees per 1,000 students and a Chief Diversity Officer. About two-thirds of all faculty job postings require a DEI statement. Devotion to diversity ideology runs so deep that, for some time, UConn required medical students to pledge a DEI-infused version of the Hippocratic Oath, which it recently made only optional. The school plays host to other forms of administrative activism as well, such as land acknowledgments and environmental protection commitments. The school has not adopted institutional neutrality, and it shows.

UConn’s administration does not respect free speech. Only 13 percent of students tell the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) 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. The school employs 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 is ideologically skewed. 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 2.9. Nearly every faculty campaign donation in the 2023–24 election cycle went to liberal or Democratic causes. An insignificant number of faculty members belong to organizations that promote free inquiry on campus.

The school ranks in the middle of the pack for student ideological diversity and political tolerance. For every conservative student at UConn, there are about four liberal ones. Students, generally speaking, are more open to left-wing campus speakers than they are to right-wing ones, but attempts at disruption and de-platforming are not common. Self-censorship is a problem but not universal: 45 percent tell FIRE that they censor themselves at least once a month.

The curriculum at UConn could use improvement. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) gives the school a B 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 requires its students to take DEI-focused courses to graduate but neglects more academically fulfilling subjects, such as history and government.

UConn often proves a good investment. Retention and graduation rates are higher than expectations set by data from SAT scores and Pell Grant recipients. The school has an 83 percent six-year graduation rate, more than two points higher than predicted. Graduates tend to do well in their professions. Median annual earnings ten years after initial enrollment overperform expectations by about $3,000. It takes graduates, on average, 2.3 years to pay back the cost of their education, the same as our overall average.