City Journal’s 2026 College Rankings

Are America’s colleges and universities delivering the education that students and the country need? Unfortunately, most are not. For City Journal’s 2026 College Rankings, we scored 115 of the country’s most prominent schools on 95 variables measuring campus governance, educational experience, student life, and career outcomes. On our 100-point scale, not one of these 115 schools scored above 80. Only seven earned a 70 or higher. Eighty-seven received scores below 60. The average score of an American school of higher education this year was an abysmal 50/100.

This assessment might sound harsh, but most Americans now seem to share it. A 2025 Pew survey, for example, found that 70 percent believe higher education is heading in the “wrong direction.” According to polling from Gallup, confidence in higher education has dropped from 57 percent in 2015 to only 38 percent today. More strikingly, only 31 percent say that a college education is “very important,” the lowest portion since Gallup first asked the question in 1978. The American public, in other words, is increasingly unsure whether college is “worth it.”

But whether college is a worthwhile investment ultimately depends on which college a student chooses to attend. Higher education’s failures are widespread, but our evaluation reveals that they are not uniformly distributed across campuses. The highest- and lowest-scoring schools are separated by more than 60 points on our 100-point scale, and our tracking over the last year shows that there’s an increasingly stark divide between colleges and universities working to solve their problems and those trying to ignore them. Some schools, for instance, have reinstated standardized testing for admissions, removed diversity statements from the faculty hiring process, eliminated DEI offices, and formally endorsed institutional neutrality. Many other schools, by contrast, have made no attempt to correct course, apparently convinced that public disillusionment with higher education is the result of “bad faith” critics and not their own practices.

The uneven performance of the country’s top colleges and universities raises difficult questions for prospective students. Where can they find a rigorous curriculum that exposes them to competing ideas? Which campuses have leaders who consistently defend academic standards, meritocracy, and open inquiry? Are some schools better than others in preparing graduates for responsible citizenship and productive careers?

Unfortunately, the best-known college rankings adopt too narrow a view about the purpose of higher education to provide much help in answering these questions. For better or worse, higher education does far more than simply confer a credential. Colleges and universities shape the minds, characters, and futures of their students. As former Barnard College president Judith Shapiro once said, the job of higher education is to develop an inner life rich enough that “the inside of your head is an interesting place to spend the rest of your life.”

The prestige-focused rankings, however, offer little insight into the content of the education students will receive, the classroom and campus environment they will inhabit, or the values that will surround them. Their emphasis on admissions selectivity, graduation rates, and long-term career outcomes also leaves them poorly equipped to capture the year-to-year changes in campus climate that exert the most direct influence on a student’s college experience. For example, a university that reforms its entire general education curriculum to teach an appreciation of the Western canon, starts a civil-discourse initiative that encourages students to engage across lines of political difference, and changes its campus speech policies to encourage free expression receives no credit for these improvements in most current rankings systems. A better, more reliable guide to “America’s best colleges” would place these formative factors at the center of its evaluation and reward meaningful efforts to improve them.

We started the City Journal College Rankings last year to do exactly this. Combining data from government sources, other ratings systems, and our own original research, our rankings provide a quantitative and holistic assessment of America’s colleges and universities. Without access to comparable evidence about the education provided by the country’s most prominent schools, prospective students and their families will too often make application and enrollment decisions based on reputation alone. Our goal is to give them the information they need to judge schools by present performance, not past prestige.

A project of this kind is not a value-neutral exercise. Under our approach, a school receives no points for its reputation, no points for enrolling high-scoring students, and no points for accepting only a tiny percentage of its applicants. Instead, our rankings give substantial weight to the career and formative effects of attending a given campus. Specifically, we compile 95 distinct measures that evaluate institutional performance across four broad categories:

Governance Quality (20 points): We assign higher scores to schools whose administrators have defended academic standards, protected free expression, committed to meritocracy in faculty hiring and admissions, and resisted the temptation to turn their campuses into stages for performative political activists.

Educational Experience (30 points): We recognize the excellence of institutions that seek through deeds (not mere words) to prioritize intellectual pluralism in faculty hiring, that strive to recover core learning in Western civilization and American civics, and that have resisted the absorption of core academic disciplines by faddish and shallow political movements. We give particular weight to independent and well-staffed academic programs with courses devoted to foundational texts, American institutions, and civil discourse.

Student Life (10 points): We reward institutions that foster campus cultures characterized by viewpoint diversity, freedom of thought, varied and benevolent forms of belonging, and resistance to political radicalism.

Outcomes (40 points): We give more points to schools that demonstrate a track record of preparing students for successful careers beyond what would have been expected given their students’ socioeconomic and academic backgrounds. This approach ensures that schools are acknowledged for the impact they have on their graduates and not just whether they happen to enroll students who were likely to succeed anyway.

What’s New This Year

While the guiding principles we use to evaluate colleges and universities have not changed, we have made a number of improvements from last year’s rankings. We have expanded our coverage to include a wider range of religiously affiliated schools (e.g., Yeshiva University, Catholic University of America), small liberal arts colleges (Smith College, Oberlin College, Gettysburg College, Kenyon College, Colorado College), and large public universities (UC Irvine, UC Santa Barbara, University of Vermont, George Mason University, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, aka Virginia Tech). Overall, our rankings now score 115 colleges and universities that receive high scores in other ranking systems, are widely known to the American public, or hold major regional significance.

More importantly, we have significantly deepened our assessment of these 115 schools by adding more than 25 new measures of the overall experience at each campus that no other rankings system even attempts to track. Six additions in particular are worth highlighting.

First, we are now scoring the speeches, op-eds, letters, and other public statements from school presidents based on whether they support merit-based hiring and admissions, academic rigor, viewpoint diversity, and institutional neutrality. Publicly stated commitments are not, of course, a substitute for concrete actions, but they signal which principles university leaders are willing to defend and the standards they expect their campus communities to uphold.

Second, our new analysis of campaign contributions examines the political diversity of a school’s faculty members and administrative staff. Drawing on federal election donation records, we identified each group’s average political orientation and the share of campaign donors that fall on the minority (i.e., conservative) side of the ideological spectrum. These complementary measures reward campuses with more political balance among those who shape student life inside and outside of the classroom.

Third, we have added an assessment of each school’s curricular and staffing priorities by examining nearly 3,000 history faculty biographies and more than 24,000 history course catalogue descriptions. We code faculty biographies for their emphasis on American history and critical theory, calculate the ratio of courses whose descriptions use Western-canon versus progressive vocabularies, and compare the number of tenure-line historians with the number of core and affiliated identity-studies faculty. These measures reward schools that prioritize foundational historical learning and penalize schools that have subordinated the teaching of history to contemporary ideological agendas.

Fourth, we now assess a school’s susceptibility to malign foreign influence by tracking federally reported gifts and contracts from “countries of concern” (i.e., China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea). We examine the total value of this funding, its annualized size relative to the school’s overall operating budget, and the share restricted to specified purposes or directly tied to foreign governments. These measures identify financial relationships with the potential to compromise a school’s independence without treating foreign funding itself as proof of improper influence.

Fifth, we carefully scrutinize the scope and trajectory of campus-wide DEI efforts. For example, we award more points to schools that have genuinely eliminated their central DEI offices and identity-based centers than to schools that have merely rebranded or reorganized them. Similarly, we track not only whether a school has issued a formal policy prohibiting diversity statements in faculty hiring but also whether the school has abided by this policy in the job advertisements they post. These measures are designed to reward substantive reform at a time when many schools are making only cosmetic changes.

Finally, we now include a “Balanced Excellence” bonus that boosts schools with strong performances across all four of our categories. This bonus, which can increase a school’s score by up to 10 points, helps distinguish schools with major deficiencies in some areas from schools that are strong across the board.

Taken together, these additions make our rankings more comprehensive, more discerning, and more responsive to the changes taking place on college campuses. The end result is a resource that provides prospective students and their families with an empirically grounded tool for deciding which schools are deserving of their time, their money, and their trust.

What the Results Show

Ninety-four percent of the schools we evaluated this year received a score below 70. These low scores indicate that most colleges and universities are falling well short of what we see as the bare minimum standard for a high-quality education. But the disappointing overall picture our scoring system paints does not mean that every school is equally disappointing. Indeed, our rankings are intentionally designed to show how schools compare with each other and where students have the best relative chance of receiving a good education.

Our holistic approach to evaluating colleges and universities produces results that don’t always align with the conclusions of traditional rankings systems. At the top of our list this year, for example, are the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Florida, the University of Notre Dame, and Claremont McKenna College. While these schools have often found themselves relegated to the second tier in prestige-obsessed rankings, they stand out in the areas of curriculum, governance, and campus culture that these other systems simply do not measure. UT Austin and UF rank first and second overall, respectively, because of their strong Educational Experience and Governance Quality scores. Notre Dame earns its third-place finish with the best Student Life among our 115 schools and a top 10 showing in Outcomes. By contrast, Claremont McKenna (#5 overall) does not break the top 5 in any of our four categories but scores well overall because it ranks among the top 14 across the board. These results show that there is no single route to a high score in our rankings system and, more importantly, that different combinations of strengths can make a school worth attending.

As our results also show, however, even the “best” schools have serious shortcomings. UT Austin, for example, ranks 106th on our measure of student self-censorship (part of our Student Life category). Notre Dame ranks 110th on administrative support for free speech (under Governance Quality). Despite ranking sixth overall, the University of North Carolina is #88 on our index of faculty ideological pluralism (a component of Educational Experience). For a prospective student primarily concerned about free expression on campus or the political balance of faculty members, these weaknesses may outweigh these schools’ other strengths. By publishing our category and subcategory scores alongside our overall assessment, we make those trade-offs explicit, so readers can assess schools according to their own priorities.

Our rankings should not be interpreted as a judgment of every course, every professor, every administrator, or every student on the campuses we evaluate. There is no guarantee that students attending one of our top-ranked schools will receive a good education. Sadly, ideological intimidation, shallow instruction, and political indoctrination are features of nearly every college campus today, including the ones at the top of our list. Similarly, it is possible to find gifted teachers, demanding courses, and serious intellectual communities at the schools receiving our lowest scores. Even the schools with the most lopsided and activist faculties and administrative staffs typically have academic departments, individual professors, and student organizations that provide some escape from an otherwise ideologically suffocating campus culture. But the purpose of an evaluative tool like the City Journal College Rankings is not to dwell on exceptions but to communicate probabilities. Our conviction is that, on balance, students will have a better shot at obtaining a sound education at schools rated highly on our list.

Higher education’s “crisis of confidence” is not going away. With pressure mounting from students, parents, alumni, and policymakers, now is a time of great uncertainty for the American university. This uncertainty, however, has created an unprecedented opportunity for experimentation, innovation, and reform. We intend the City Journal College Rankings to encourage these efforts. Meaningful change in higher education will happen only when prospective students begin holding colleges and universities accountable through informed decision-making and “voting with their feet.” By empowering students with a holistic and data-driven ranking system, we hope to facilitate American higher education’s return to its fundamental mission: fostering rigorous intellectual inquiry, preparing students for engaged citizenship, and strengthening society through genuine learning.