2025 College Rankings

The University of Miami is a private Florida institution that, unlike some of the public universities in the state, is not performing at the top of its game. Miami’s administrative commitments to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) are small, in comparison with many other schools. Still, the school maintains a DEI bureaucracy, with slightly fewer than two employees for every 1,000 undergraduates. Only 16.5 percent of faculty job listings require diversity statements.

Yet the administration’s record on free speech is unimpressive. The school employs a bias-response system, designed to police the airing of opinions that some may consider offensive. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) gives the school a “red” speech code rating, meaning that its policies explicitly restrict speech.

The faculty at Miami is, for the most part, liberal, though less so than at some peer institutions. When asked to place their professors on an ideological continuum, where 1 is “very liberal” and 7 is “very conservative,” students put them, on average, at 3. About 95 percent of faculty campaign donations in the 2023–24 election cycle went to liberal or Democratic causes, and an insignificant number of faculty members belong to organizations that promote free inquiry on campus. Students are relatively balanced in their ideological views. There are 1.3 liberal students for every conservative. Generally speaking, these students are open with their views—and open to hearing those of peers who may disagree with them. Only 6 percent of students tell FIRE that they are “very” or “fairly” often offended by perspectives shared by classmates. The school ranks in our top 10 percent for the comfort that students feel in expressing themselves during informal discussions, in class, and with professors. That comfort extends to written assignments and social media as well.

The curriculum at Miami is decent. 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. Still, the school could do better. It does not require its students to complete courses in U.S. history or government for graduation. At the same time, it does not force them to take courses focused on DEI.

Miami does not perform well on our measures of post-graduate earnings. On average, it takes about three years to pay back the cost of the education, a bit longer than our overall 2.3-year average. Graduates also often get off to slow starts in their careers. Median annual earnings ten years after initial enrollment slightly underperform expectations, based on data from SAT scores and Pell Grant recipients.