2025 College Rankings

The University of Michigan–Ann Arbor played a central role in promoting many of the ideologies that have done so much damage in American higher education. Michigan is radically devoted to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives. Until very recently, the school had a massive DEI bureaucracy, with more than six employees per 1,000 undergraduates—a large number, especially considering that the school enrolls about 34,000 undergraduates. Michigan’s DEI spending has been the subject of much scrutiny since it began about a decade ago, when the school announced that it was spending hundreds of millions of dollars with the aim of injecting every facet of campus life with DEI ideology. The school announced this year, however, that it would slash DEI spending—and shutter its department—after the Department of Education threatened to cut federal funding to the university.

Michigan’s administration was negligent in responding to the radical anti-Semitic protesters who set up camp on the school’s grounds in spring 2024. The administration allowed the encampment to remain for nearly a month before clearing out the protesters—after graduation. The school suspended one of the student groups that had played a leading role in spreading hate on campus. Michigan’s record on free speech is mixed: the school has adopted a bias-response system, designed to police the airing of possibly offensive opinions; however, it has endorsed the Chicago Principles, which promote the protection of free expression on campus. 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.

The faculty is unbalanced in its political views. Students, when asked to place their professors on an ideological continuum, where 1 is “very liberal” and 7 “very conservative,” put them at 2.4, on average. Only 2 percent of faculty campaign donations went to conservative or Republican causes in the 2023–24 election cycle; the rest went to liberal or Democratic ones. A small number of faculty belong to organizations that promote free inquiry in the classroom.

Students are just as unbalanced in their views. For every conservative student at Michigan, there are 3.2 liberals, and liberal student political organizations outnumber conservative ones by 4 to 1. Nearly 40 percent of students tell FIRE that it is “sometimes” or “always” acceptable to shout down a campus speaker in the event of controversy. There have been several attempted de-platformings at Michigan in the last five years—notably, in 2023, student activists shouted so much at conservative commentator Josh Hammer during a speech that the event had to be paused until the activists left. Self-censorship is a problem at Michigan as well: 47 percent of students say that they do so at least once a month.

The curriculum at Michigan is poor. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) gives the school a C 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 rigorous subjects, such as history and government.

Michigan is a mixed bag for graduates. Though The Princeton Review ranks its alumni network among the top 20 nationwide for public schools, graduates sometimes struggle early in their careers. Median annual earnings ten years after initial enrollment overperform expectations by only $1,700, based on data from SAT scores and Pell Grant recipients. The same data show that the school produces significantly fewer Ph.D.s than would be expected. That said, Michigan’s six-year graduation and retention rates perform significantly better than expected.