The 2027 College Free Speech Rankings, our biggest annual project, produced with FIRE, went live today. It's the fullest picture we have of how students actually describe the climate for free expression on their own campuses, and it's public in full.
The numbers behind it are hard to ignore: over 63,000 undergraduate responses, according to the report. That's what lets us rank hundreds of schools on what students say rather than on reputation.
Each school's score comes from questions students answered about their own campus: how comfortable they feel sharing ideas, how their school handles a range of speakers, whether the administration has their back, and whether they self-censor. The whole thing rests on what enrolled students told us, not on anyone's press office.
What you’ll find
- Every school, ranked. Search for your campus and see exactly where it lands, and why.
- The component scores. Dig into the pieces behind each ranking, from openness and tolerance to self-censorship and administrative support.
- Compare campuses. Put schools side by side to see how their free-speech climates stack up.
Why it matters
Everyone talks about free expression on campus. Far fewer people measure it from where the students sit. That's the gap this project fills. Prospective students, parents, reporters, and administrators can all use the rankings to anchor the conversation in what students on the ground report instead of trading anecdotes. And because the data is transparent and comes straight from students, any campus can treat its placement as a useful starting point rather than a verdict.
Rankings like these travel. A school's placement can shape headlines, admissions conversations, and how a campus talks about its own culture all year. That's why it matters that the scores come from students — the people who actually know what it's like to speak up in class, in the dorm, or online. With this many responses behind it, the patterns hold up. They aren't the residue of one bad news cycle. That scale is a big part of why these findings are worth taking seriously.
The top and bottom schools, the biggest movers, the trends across hundreds of campuses: it's all on the rankings site. Go see where your school landed.
