The best colleges for political diversity

It is decision time for the high school class of 2025, with commitments due to colleges by May 1. Among the many factors that students might consider when deciding whether a college is the right fit for them is the political climate on campus. Simply put, are both liberals and conservatives relatively well represented in the student body? Or are students’ political views lopsided in one direction?

Thankfully, there’s a great source of information about this question: a massive study from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and College Pulse, which includes survey responses from 58,807 students on 257 college campuses. Among many questions about free speech, the organizations asked students to report their own political orientations. Those responses were then turned into a liberal-to-conservative ratio for each school. (Look up every school’s ratio here.)

As the study notes, despite some evidence that Gen-Z may be moving to the right, college students remain overwhelmingly liberal:

Of the students surveyed, 47 percent identified as politically liberal, 21 percent identified as conservative, and 16 percent identified as moderate. The remaining students identified as Democratic Socialists (3 percent), Libertarians (2 percent), something else (4 percent), or said they “haven’t thought much about this” (8 percent). Seven students (0.01 percent) did not provide an answer.

When we zoom out and look at the universe of schools included in the sample—which represent the most selective universities and liberal arts colleges in the country, along with most states’ flagship and tech schools—we see a couple of telling patterns.

First, given students’ overall liberal tilt, it’s unsurprising that liberal-leaning colleges and universities significantly outnumber conservative-leaning ones—228 to 29. Second, as expected, elite, highly selective schools tend to be more liberal than their less selective peers. See Figure 1 for what that looks like, plotting schools’ admissions rates against their liberal-to-conservative ratios. (The figure is interactive; click on a dot to see the name of the school.)

In some cases, schools are politically unbalanced in the extreme. Indeed, you might say that some colleges really put the “liberal” in the liberal arts. From the study:

At two schools—Kenyon College and Pitzer College—only one student identified as conservative. At Macalester College, not a single student identified as conservative. The average liberal-to-conservative student ratio on the 228 predominantly liberal campuses is 7:1, with an extremely unbalanced maximum of 85:1 at Kenyon.

But  good news also awaits students looking for political diversity and well-balanced student populations: there are plenty of schools to choose from, including a handful of the most selective ones.

Specifically, five elite colleges and universities (with acceptance rates of 25 percent or less) have relative parity among liberal and conservative students (with liberal-to-conservative or conservative-to-liberal ratios of 1.5:1 or smaller): Washington and Lee, Notre Dame, University of Miami, Boston College, and Wake Forest. (Villanova just barely misses the cut.)

Table 1: Selective colleges ranked by most liberal to most conservative
(Politically balanced schools in bold.)

Meanwhile, for students looking at less selective colleges or universities, the choices are much more bountiful. The FIRE/College Pulse study identifies almost 50 schools that have relative parity between liberals and conservatives along with admissions rates greater than 25 percent. That includes many large state schools, such as Oklahoma State, South Carolina, Clemson, Mississippi State, Penn State, Alabama, Kentucky, Utah, Arkansas, LSU, West Virginia, Nebraska, Georgia, Purdue, and Washington State.

Table 2: Less selective colleges with politically balanced student populations
(Ranked from most to least liberal)

Given the recent—and ongoing—upheavals at many colleges and universities, lots of people have been calling on higher education to do more to create a welcoming environment for students with widely varying political views. In practice, for most schools, that means making campuses safe for young conservatives. The good news is that there are plenty of colleges and universities that are already doing so.

Special thanks to Fordham Institute Research Associate Heena Kuwayama for her assistance with this article.