What's New This Year?

This year's rankings add four new schools: Colorado Mesa University, University of Colorado Colorado Springs, Fort Lewis College, and Adams State University and improves the calculation of political tolerance. The pre-registered methodology is available on the Open Science Foundation's website.

Background

In 2020, in collaboration with College Pulse and RealClearEducation, FIRE launched a first-of-its-kind tool to help high school students and their parents identify which colleges promote and protect the free exchange of ideas: the College Free Speech Rankings. The initial rankings report and online tool sparked an outpouring of praise from students, parents, and alumni alike.

What began with 55 campuses in 2020 has now grown into a sweeping annual study of 261 schools, capturing the voices of almost 350,000 students — and almost 63,000 this year alone. Whether you're a prospective student sizing up your options, a professor curious about classroom openness, or an administrator charting a path forward, the rankings illuminate what free expression truly looks like on campus — and how it differs from school to school.

Acknowledgments

Our gratitude goes to Nathan Honeycutt, Chapin Lenthall-Cleary, and Sam Abrams for support with questionnaire design, developing the scoring methodology, data analysis, data validation, and editing. We would additionally like to thank Keelyn M. Gallagher, Logan Dougherty, Angela C. Erickson, Emily Nayyer, and Ryne Weiss for support with data validation and editing; and Jackson Fleagle for designing the report. And last but not least, FIRE is a nonprofit organization and these rankings would not be possible without the generous support of our donors.

About the Author

Sean Stevens's photo

Sean Stevens

Chief Researcher

Sean Stevens, FIRE's Chief Researcher, obtained his Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey – New Brunswick in 2013 continued to work at Rutgers University, first as the Research Director of the Social Perception Lab and then as a Postdoctoral Fellow, also in affiliation with the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. In 2016, Sean became Heterodox Academy's first Director of Research where he developed the Campus Expression Survey, before moving to FIRE in 2020. For almost two decades, Sean's research has focused on understanding how moral convictions produce motivated reasoning within the political domain, how this motivated reasoning can distort research in the social sciences, and how motivated reasoning can lead to political intolerance and create obstacles to political compromise. He has collaborated on the development of numerous psychometric measures and is also a member of the Best Practices in Science Movement, and works to promote scientific integrity practices in the social sciences.

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Resources

Recommended Citations

Report: Stevens, S.T. (2026). 2027 College Free Speech Rankings: What Is the State of Free Speech on America's College Campuses? The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. https://www.fire.org/rankings

Website: Stevens, S.T. (2026). College Free Speech Rankings. rankings.fire.org

Our Methodology

Learn about the 12 factors used to calculate each school's score and rank, including how the factors are evaluated and how much they count in the overall score.

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