2025 College Rankings

The University of Minnesota’s administration is held captive to activist interests. The school has not adopted institutional neutrality, and it shows. It is signed on to numerous commitments extraneous to its mission, including land acknowledgments, environmental protection pledges, and a host of racial justice initiatives. The school is a proponent of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) ideology, and slightly more than 40 percent of its faculty job listings require a DEI statement.

The school’s faculty is among the least ideologically diverse of any university that we studied. When asked to place their professors on an ideological continuum, where 1 is “very liberal” and 7 is “very conservative,” students put them at 2.4, on average. In the 2023–24 campaign cycle, 98 percent of faculty donations went to Democratic or liberal causes. A minuscule number of faculty members belong to organizations that promote free inquiry on campus, an indication that the classroom is dominated by professors’ ideology.

Students, like professors, tend to be very liberal—and highly intolerant of views other than their own. For every conservative student, there are two liberals. Forty-five percent of students tell the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) that it is “sometimes” or “always” acceptable to shout down a campus speaker; 36 percent say that blocking a campus speaker is “sometimes” or “always” acceptable; and 24 percent say the same about the use of violence in these situations. In 2023, students attempted to disinvite Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, based on her generally conservative legal opinions.

The combination of an activist administration with an intolerant faculty and student body has contributed greatly to the rampant anti-Semitism at Minnesota. Here, the school ranks 99 out of 100 in our ratings, for good reason. A significant number of faculty members have advocated an academic boycott of Israel in the last few years, and the school’s student government has pushed for Minnesota to join the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel. Administrators have not coped successfully with the problem. In the most notable incident, in spring 2024, the school brokered a settlement with extreme anti-Semitic protesters after they occupied campus for nine days. In 2025, the federal government announced that it is investigating Minnesota for its inaction in dealing with what has become an endemic problem at the school.

Minnesota’s curriculum is not impressive. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) gives Minnesota 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 does not mandate history or government courses for graduation but does require that its students take DEI-focused courses.

The University of Minnesota can disappoint its students after graduation with regard to career outcomes. It takes, on average, 2.4 years to pay back the cost of the education, slightly longer than our benchmark of 2.3 years. The average annual median income ten years after initial enrollment falls far below expectations, based on data from SAT scores and Pell Grant recipients; it is nearly $4,900 less than predicted.