2025 College Rankings

The University of Notre Dame is the most recognizable Catholic college in the country, largely because of its storied football team. While the university’s academic program has been damaged by the ideological trends that affect much of higher education, it has weathered these trends better than many of its peers.

Notre Dame receives a “red” speech code rating from FIRE—in this case, for a policy that forbids students from posting “offensive material” on the Internet using university resources. The school has adopted a bias-response system, and only 23 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 an offensive speech controversy.

Notre Dame’s administration is relatively free of the activist pressures that plague so many other schools, with a few notable exceptions. The school filed an amicus brief in support of affirmative action in the Students for Fair Admissions case at the Supreme Court. Notre Dame’s commitment to DEI runs deeper than a preference for affirmative action. The school maintains a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) bureaucracy (recently renamed) with about three employees for every 1,000 students. The school runs several other diversity programs as well, some of which have come under scrutiny. The federal government announced in 2025 that it is investigating Notre Dame for possible racial discrimination in its admissions process.

Yet Notre Dame has one of the more ideologically diverse faculties of any school that we studied. Students place faculty members on an ideological continuum almost exactly in the “moderate” spot. Faculty campaign donations in the 2023–24 election cycle were more balanced than at many other schools: 70 percent went to Democratic or liberal causes, while nearly 10 percent went to Republican or conservative ones.

Students at Notre Dame are fairly politically tolerant. There is a high level of willingness to allow controversial figures to speak on campus, and the student body is tolerant of left-wing speakers and especially right-wing speakers. In general, students do not believe it acceptable to disrupt campus speakers: 75 percent tell FIRE that it is “rarely” or “never” acceptable to shout down a speaker, and 84 percent say the same about blocking a speaker from coming to campus. Almost the entire student body, 95 percent, say that violence is almost never acceptable in the case of a controversial speaker.

Notre Dame’s curriculum is middling. 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. ACTA does identify one area of excellence: the Center for Citizenship & Constitutional Government, which offers fellowships for undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and visiting scholars to study leadership and citizenship.

Notre Dame can be a good investment. Retention and six-year graduation rates are higher than predictions, based on data from SAT scores and Pell Grant recipients. Graduates also do much better than what the same data would indicate: median career earnings ten years after initial enrollment are $14,500 higher than predictions.