2025 College Rankings

The University of Washington’s administration is dominated by activists. The school has signed onto numerous commitments extraneous to its educational mission and has not committed to institutional neutrality, even as it becomes mired in controversy. The school maintains a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) bureaucracy, and 60 percent of its faculty job listings require a diversity statement. The school is “test blind” in admissions, meaning that it does not consider prospective students’ SAT or ACT scores, a signal that it values diversity over merit.

The administration visibly failed in its approach to the anti-Semitic protests that swept the campus in the 2023–24 academic year. The problem had been festering at UW for years. The school has an active Faculty for Justice in Palestine chapter and a number of departments committed to an academic boycott of Israel. When student protesters, in violation of UW policy, pitched an encampment on school grounds in spring 2024, administrators allowed it to remain for 18 days before negotiating a settlement—not a high point for the school’s leadership, but at least the administrators did not completely capitulate to the protesters’ demands. When UW’s student government passed a resolution requesting that the school participate in the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, administrators declined to do so.

UW does not prioritize free speech. Only 22 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 views in a controversy over offensive speech. The school uses a bias-response system, designed to police the airing of opinions that some may consider offensive. FIRE gives the school a “red” speech code rating, meaning that its policies explicitly restrict speech.

Students are not ideologically diverse. There are nearly six liberal students for every conservative, and liberal student political organizations heavily outweigh conservative ones. Students tend not to be tolerant of views opposed to the dominant ones on campus, particularly in the case of campus speakers: 43 percent of students tell FIRE that it is “sometimes” or “always” acceptable to shout down a controversial speaker; 50 percent of students say that they self-censor at least once a month.

The curriculum at UW is among the worst of any school that we studied on our metrics. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) gives the school an F 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. Students must take DEI-focused courses to graduate, but the school doesn’t mandate history or government classes.

That said, UW can be a good financial investment for graduates. On average, it takes only 1.2 years to pay back the cost of the education, much shorter than our 2.3-year benchmark. However, median annual earnings ten years after initial enrollment are slightly lower, by about $1,000, than expectations set by data from SAT scores and Pell Grant recipients.