2025 College Rankings

Williams College was once one of the most prestigious small liberal arts colleges in the United States. These days, the school has eroded most of its prestige with a multitude of commitments to activist causes.

Williams employs a large DEI bureaucracy, with more than five DEI employees per 1,000 undergraduates, as well as a Chief Diversity Officer. Nearly 75 percent of faculty job postings require diversity statements. As the federal government pressured colleges around the country to cut down on their DEI departments, Williams responded by announcing that it would uphold its commitments to DEI.

Williams’s commitment to free speech is lackluster. Students are ambivalent about the school’s attentiveness to protecting speech on campus. Williams employs a bias-response system, designed to police the airing of opinions that some may consider offensive. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) gives the school a “yellow” speech code rating, meaning that its policies could easily be abused to suppress speech.

The faculty forms an ideological monoculture. On an ideological continuum, where 1 is “very liberal” and 7 is “very conservative,” students put Williams professors at 2.5, on average. However, The Princeton Review reports that Williams students place their professors among the top 25 nationwide for the teaching experience. A relatively large number of Williams faculty are members of Heterodox Academy, an organization that encourages free inquiry on campus.

Students at Williams are among the least tolerant of any school that we studied. Their ideological makeup is, for the most part, left-leaning. Indeed, there are three liberal students for every conservative. Students tell FIRE that they are far more willing to ban controversial right-wing speakers than they are controversial left-wing ones. Since 2019, there have been several de-platforming attempts—notable, considering that the school enrolls only about 2,200 students. In one of these incidents, in 2024, student protesters repeatedly interrupted speakers at a roundtable with vulgar anti-Semitic chants, forcing the event to end early.

The curriculum at Williams is weak. 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 has a DEI course requirement to graduate, but no history or government requirement.

Like many small liberal arts colleges, Williams does not perform well on our metrics of graduate ROI. Though The Princeton Review ranks its alumni network among the top 20 nationwide for private schools, median annual earnings ten years after initial enrollment underperform expectations by over $7,000, based on data from SAT scores and Pell Grant recipients. That said, the school produces significantly more Ph.D.s than expected.