2025 College Rankings

Founded by the industrialist Cornelius Vanderbilt, Vanderbilt University was the product of Gilded Age optimism about higher education’s role in shaping American leaders. Vanderbilt has been swept up in the same currents that have overwhelmed most of elite higher education, though recent leadership changes indicate that it may be poised actively to resist.

Vanderbilt’s record on free speech is mixed. About a third of students tell the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) that it is “extremely” or “very” clear that the administration protects speech on campus. FIRE gives the school a “yellow” speech code rating, meaning that its policies could easily be abused to suppress speech. That said, there are signs that Vanderbilt values free speech. The school, for example, has endorsed the Chicago Principles, which were formulated to protect free expression.

Vanderbilt has suffered at the hands of activists within its administration. The school has employed a sizable Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) bureaucracy, with more than three DEI employees for every 1,000 undergraduates and a Chief Diversity Officer to keep everyone on message. The current status of that DEI apparatus is unclear, with sizable portions subject to closure in response to Trump administration mandates. In addition to DEI, the school has dabbled in other activist fads: land acknowledgments, preferred pronouns, and environmental protection commitments, for example. In the Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) case at the Supreme Court, Vanderbilt filed a brief in support of affirmative action, a disappointing sign that the administration values diversity over merit. Though he was president at the time of the SFFA brief and did not take any major steps to close Vanderbilt’s DEI office before the election of President Trump, Vanderbilt’s Daniel Diermeier has emerged as a powerful advocate of reform in higher education. Last year, under his leadership, Vanderbilt became a strong supporter of institutional neutrality, a welcome sign amid other disappointments. With Washington University’s Andrew Martin, Diermeier also released an admirable and widely publicized Statement of Principles to guide reform in the academy. It remains to be seen exactly how these principles will reshape Vanderbilt.

The faculty at Vanderbilt appears to be somewhat more ideologically diverse than at peer institutions. Students put their professors relatively close to the “moderate” spot on an ideological continuum, on average. In the 2023–24 election cycle, 88 percent of faculty donations went to Democratic or liberal causes while 8 percent went to conservative or Republican ones—still wildly lopsided but not as imbalanced as many other schools. A fair number of professors, by our metrics, belong to Heterodox Academy, an organization that promotes free inquiry on campus.

Students at Vanderbilt are not so ideologically diverse, though they tend to be tolerant of views other than their own. Most lean left. There are more than four liberal students for every conservative at Vanderbilt, and liberal student political organizations outnumber conservative ones by nearly two to one. The school has a serious self-censorship problem. More than half the students tell FIRE that they censor themselves at least once a month, and the school ranks in the bottom 20 percent of all schools in its support for free speech. That attitude of censorship does not extend to campus speakers, though: there have been no attempted de-platformings at Vanderbilt in the last five years.

The curriculum at Vanderbilt is need of reform. 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 shows a lack of interest in requiring that its students receive a grounding in subjects such as U.S. history and government.

Vanderbilt can be a solid financial investment for graduates. On average, it takes only 1.7 years to pay back the cost of the education, slightly shorter than our overall 2.3-year average. Vanderbilt graduates overperform expected median earnings ten years after enrollment, based on SAT scores and Pell Grant data, by over $4,000. The school’s six-year graduation and retention rates, 93 percent and 96 percent, respectively, meet expectations.