2025 College Rankings

The University of Richmond is a well-regarded liberal arts school in Virginia’s capital that has fallen into some of the same traps as many of its peers. Richmond’s leadership has embraced some of the most troubling trends in higher education—including adopting environmental pledges and promoting preferred pronouns in faculty bios—none of which advances the school’s core educational mission.

Richmond has a significant Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) bureaucracy. The school has a large DEI bureaucracy, with nearly six employees for every 1,000 undergraduates and a Chief Diversity Officer keeping everyone in line. More than 35 percent of faculty job postings require a diversity statement.

Richmond’s commitment to free speech is mixed. 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, indicating that its policies could easily be abused to suppress speech. However, the school also has endorsed the Chicago Principles, which promote the protection of free expression on campus—a positive sign among many negative indicators.

Nearly 3 percent of Richmond professors—a large number, by our metrics—belong to Heterodox Academy, an organization that promotes free inquiry on campus. There have been no attempts to de-platform a speaker at Richmond since 2019.

The curriculum at Richmond needs improvement. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) gives the school a D 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 relevant requirements, such as history and government.

Richmond is a risky investment. Graduation and retention rates are not where they should be, based on data from SAT scores and Pell Grant recipients. The current six-year graduation rate is 88 percent, 3 points below where it should be, and the retention rate is 92 percent, also 3 points short. Median annual earnings ten years after initial enrollment underperform expectations, based on the same data, by about $9,500. On average, it takes 2.5 years for students to recoup the cost of their education, slightly longer than our 2.3-year benchmark.