2025 College Rankings

Vassar College is one of the historic Seven Sisters schools and, though it became coeducational in 1969, trades heavily on its progressive feminist reputation. Its elegant history and list of illustrious female graduates cannot obscure how Vassar is not the school it once was. It rounds out the bottom of our rankings.

To begin with, Vassar’s educational standards are unimpressive. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) gives it 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. Both its administration and student body are subject to the wishes of a robust Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) bureaucracy. Indeed, 90 percent of the school’s jobs listings require a diversity statement, and there are just shy of five DEI employees for every 1,000 students. Students must take courses that emphasize DEI to graduate.

Most visibly, Vassar is a hotbed for anti-Semitic student activism, a tendency prominent long before students across the country began demonstrating against Israel in the wake of Hamas’s October 7, 2023, massacre. The AMCHA Initiative reports that in recent years, Vassar’s campus sees about 195 incidents of anti-Semitism for every 1,000 Jewish students, a shockingly high number for a school with only 2,500 students. In 2014, the school’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine posted a Nazi cartoon on its social-media channels, drawing national condemnation. The same group, along with other campus activists, annually hosts Israel Apartheid Week and frequently introduces petitions for the school to participate in the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel. In 2024, activists set up an encampment that lasted five days and disbanded only when the administration agreed to review its demands for BDS. When the board of trustees ultimately rejected the measure, activists took the school by storm, spray-painting anti-Semitic messages all over campus buildings.

Many Vassar students take activism more seriously than their studies; so, too, do many of the faculty. Of all the schools that we studied, Vassar had the most activist administration. Indeed, many professors were vocal in their support for the recent student encampment and BDS demands, actions consistent with the school’s history of administrative activism. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) found in its annual college survey that Vassar’s student body perceives the faculty as overwhelmingly liberal. Faculty commitment to free inquiry is negligible: none of the school’s professors are Academic Freedom Alliance members, and just 1 percent are Heterodox Academy members.

Vassar’s commitment to freedom of expression on campus is lackluster. All of its political student organizations are left-leaning—leaving little room for viewpoint diversity—and the school earns only middling marks for free speech. FIRE gives Vassar a “yellow” rating, indicating that the college’s speech policies can easily be exploited to restrict unpopular opinions. According to data collected by the same organization, Vassar students believe that the administration is unlikely to defend a controversial guest speaker in the event of campus backlash.

Student political tolerance at Vassar is weak. The same could be said for student and faculty ideological pluralism, both of which fall toward the bottom of our rankings. Even in incidentals, which make college life enjoyable, Vassar scores poorly. We rate it in the bottom half for student social life and community life and in the bottom third for classroom experience.

Vassar has adopted just about all the recent negative trends in higher education. Students are permitted to list preferred pronouns in the school’s roster; the administration has signed on to a slew of environmental commitments; and the college submitted a brief to the Supreme Court supporting affirmative action in the Students for Fair Admissions case.

The return on educational investment is mediocre: the median annual salary of a Vassar graduate ten years after initial enrollment is only about $71,000—nearly $20,000 below what would be expected, based on data from SAT scores and Pell Grant recipients.