2025 College Rankings

The College of William & Mary is the second-oldest institution of higher learning in the United States, after Harvard University. The school’s administration is dominated by activists, and it indulges in commitments extraneous to its educational mission, such as land acknowledgments and preferred pronouns. William & Mary has bought into Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) ideology, though the encroachment is not as severe as at some other schools. There is less than one DEI employee per 1,000 undergraduates, and no faculty job postings require a diversity statement.

William & Mary has a mixed record on free speech: the school employs a bias-response system, designed to police the airing of opinions that some may consider offensive, but it appears that the administration generally does care about maintaining free expression on campus. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) gives the school a “green” speech code rating, meaning that its policies do not restrict speech.

The faculty is skewed in its political beliefs. In the 2023–24 election cycle, every faculty campaign donation went to liberal or Democratic causes. Students, when asked to place their professors on an ideological continuum, where 1 is “very liberal” and 7 is “very conservative,” put them at 2.9, on average. More than 1 percent of faculty members belong to Heterodox Academy, an organization promoting free inquiry in the classroom.

The student body is not ideologically diverse. For every conservative student, there are more than four liberal ones, and liberal student political organizations outweigh conservative ones significantly. Students tell FIRE that they are much more tolerant of left-wing campus speakers than they are of right-wing ones. That said, there has been no publicly reported de-platforming of a campus speaker at William & Mary in the last five years. Students do feel anxiety about speaking freely on campus: 44 percent of students tell FIRE that they self-censor at least once a month.

The curriculum at William & Mary is weak. 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. The school requires students to take DEI-focused courses to graduate but has no required course in history or government.

William & Mary delivers poor value to its graduates. Though The Princeton Review ranks its alumni network among the top 20 nationwide for public schools, median annual earnings ten years after initial enrollment underperform expectations by about $11,000, based on data from SAT scores and Pell Grant recipients. On average, it takes 2.1 years to pay back the cost of the education, about in line with our 2.3-year benchmark.