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.”
