If My Kids Get Into America’s Most Prestigious Colleges, I Hope They Do Not Go

September 23, 2026

Why America’s “Best” Colleges Increasingly Look Like a Recipe for Misery

If my daughter or any of her four siblings were admitted tomorrow to Harvard, Yale, Brown, Stanford, Columbia, MIT or any of the other names that used to make a parent’s chest swell at the mailbox, my hope is that they would turn around and go somewhere else.

Not because those schools are academically weak. They are not. Not because I doubt my children could succeed there. I don’t. I hope they turn those offers down because of what the data below shows about what four years inside those campuses would cost them, and because I no longer believe the name on the diploma is worth what it used to be worth.

My mailbox is full.

It is not full of mail for me. It is full of glossy envelopes, embossed invitations, oversized postcards and expensive little books addressed to my daughter.

Colleges want Maggie.

She is seventeen. She is already dual enrolled in the honors program at my own alma mater, and she is making As in college classes before many of her classmates have finished their junior year of high school. She did better on the ACT than I did. She is a gifted writer, an accomplished student and the kind of thoughtful young woman who will make almost any campus better by being there.

She is not my only reason for thinking hard about this. My son Wyatt starts college courses this fall at fifteen. I have five children, and every one of them is going to face some version of this same question in the next several years. I am not writing this essay for one child. I am writing it because I want all five of them to have a real opportunity to flourish, not merely to gain admission.

She has options.

I am happy for her. I am proud of her.

But as her father, I am also watching her approach a strange new world.

For most of my life, parents were told that the hierarchy was simple. Get into the highest-ranked college possible. Attend the most prestigious institution that will admit you. The name on the diploma will open doors, shape your future and justify whatever sacrifices are required.

That argument has weakened considerably.

In July 2026, Gallup reported that only 38 percent of Americans had a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in higher education, down from 57 percent when Gallup first asked the question in 2015. Among Americans whose highest degree is a bachelor’s degree, confidence has fallen to just 36 percent. The leading reasons people give for their distrust are political agendas, cost and failure to prepare students for work.

A 2024 Pew survey found that only one in four Americans considered a four-year degree extremely or very important for obtaining a well-paying job. Nearly half said a college degree was less important than it had been twenty years earlier. Only 22 percent believed a degree was worth its cost when obtaining it required student loans.

That does not mean college has no value. Maggie plans to attend college, and I am glad she does. In many professions, the credential remains necessary. A good education can enlarge a person’s imagination, discipline the mind, introduce lifelong friends and prepare someone for meaningful work.

But the old assumption that any degree from a more prestigious school is automatically worth more than a nearly free education from a respected public university is collapsing.

Parents are beginning to ask a better question.

Not simply, “How highly is this school ranked?”

But, “What kind of person is this institution likely to help my child become?”

The List That Changed How I See the Rankings

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression surveyed students at 265 universities and compiled their reported political affiliations.

FIRE has published the underlying data, so readers do not have to take my word for any of this. I linked it in the comments. Find your own alma mater. Find the schools your kids are considering. Then tell me what you find, because I want to know whether other parents are seeing what I am seeing.

The numbers are extraordinary.

At Scripps College, 93 percent of students identified as Democrats and only 2 percent as Republicans.

At Wellesley, the figures were 90 percent and 6 percent.

At Mount Holyoke, 89 percent and 1 percent.

Smith was 84 percent Democratic. Grinnell was 83 percent. Vassar was 82 percent. Brown, Barnard, Middlebury and Bard were each 79 percent Democratic.

The pattern continues through much of the most celebrated tier of American higher education:

Harvard: 72 percent Democratic, 14 percent Republican

Princeton: 72 percent Democratic, 15 percent Republican

Yale: 72 percent Democratic, 16 percent Republican

Stanford: 74 percent Democratic, 11 percent Republican

Columbia: 73 percent Democratic, 10 percent Republican

MIT: 73 percent Democratic, 11 percent Republican

Georgetown: 76 percent Democratic, 13 percent Republican

UCLA: 74 percent Democratic, 15 percent Republican

Emory: 69 percent Democratic, 13 percent Republican

Vanderbilt: 70 percent Democratic, 15 percent Republican

At many of these schools, Democrats do not merely outnumber Republicans. They outnumber them by five, seven, ten or even forty to one.

These are not communities that simply lean left. They are political monocultures.

How Rare Balance Actually Is

Here is the part that should get more attention than it does. Work down through all 265 schools FIRE surveyed and genuinely balanced campuses, places where neither party holds anything like a lopsided advantage, are not the rule with a few extreme outliers on either end. They are the outliers.

By the time you get to schools where the Republican share climbs into the thirties or forties, you have already left almost the entire list of famous, highly ranked private universities behind. You are looking at places like the University of Mississippi, Utah Valley University, Arkansas State, North Dakota State, the University of Kentucky and my own University of Tennessee. Work down the full list and campuses where neither major party possesses an overwhelming advantage are surprisingly rare. Across most of the dataset, and especially among the highly ranked private universities that fill up every college guide, Democrats hold advantages that would be called landslides in any ordinary American election.

That imbalance holds at one end of the spectrum, and genuine balance is simply less common than most parents assume anywhere in the American university system.

If you are a parent who wants your child to be able to say what they actually believe at the dinner table with new friends, rather than calculate in advance who is safe to say it around, a handful of real, respected, sizable universities stand out on FIRE’s list for exactly that reason. Clemson runs 39 percent Democrat to 47 percent Republican. The University of South Carolina is 36 to 51. Auburn is 36 to 47. Baylor is 36 to 49. Texas Tech is 38 to 47. My own University of Tennessee is 31 to 52. None of those are Christian colleges. None of them are obscure. They are large, accredited, well-regarded universities where a conservative or religious student is not an ideological curiosity or a solitary token. They are not perfect mirrors of the country. They are places where students on both sides exist in numbers large enough to speak, organize and form friendships, instead of a campus where one side has already won the argument before your child unpacks the car.

That list is short. It is also worth writing down before you fill out another application.

FIRE’s broader faculty research is at least as striking. Researchers examined political contributions associated with approximately 100,000 faculty members at 55 universities. They concluded that politically active professors were concentrated within a remarkably narrow liberal range, with almost no conservative counterbalance. The average politically contributing professor was measured as only slightly less left-wing than Bernie Sanders. The humanities and fine arts exhibited the least ideological diversity.

Another FIRE survey found that only 20 percent of faculty members believed a conservative would fit well within their department.

Think about that for a moment.

Universities speak constantly about diversity. They carefully measure racial composition, sex, nationality and an ever-expanding list of identities. They insist that students benefit from encountering people whose experiences differ from their own.

On that basic principle, they are right.

But when the subject is the worldview through which students understand human nature, government, sexuality, marriage, religion, justice, economics, family and the meaning of life, many elite institutions have created some of the least diverse communities in America.

A student may encounter people of every color and nationality while meeting almost no one who publicly questions the same collection of progressive assumptions.

That is diversity of appearance combined with conformity of thought.

My Children Walk a Narrow Road

My children have known from a young age that they are on a narrow road. The Bible teaches us to prepare to be a minority on the narrow way that leads to life.

Most people will go in another direction. That should not surprise them. It should not frighten them. It should certainly not cause them to abandon what they believe.

Recognizing that they are different can help them resist peer pressure. Many people follow crowds that are walking confidently in the wrong direction. The fact that an idea is fashionable does not make it true. The fact that almost everyone in a room applauds something does not make it good.

A crowd does not become wise merely because everyone in it has an impressive resume.

That does not mean I want them hidden from opposing ideas.

I studied English literature, political science, philosophy, poverty, international human rights and critical race theory. I routinely found myself in a small political and theological minority. I encountered professors who were openly hostile to my beliefs in college and again in law school.

I also benefited from the experience.

I learned that I could like and respect people whose worldviews were profoundly different from mine. I learned to recognize strong arguments from weak ones. I learned to defend my own conclusions instead of merely inheriting them.

On two occasions, one of my political science professors became so angry at my questions that he ended class early. Those were educational experiences too.

I suspect my children could survive those classrooms. They may even enjoy them.

Maggie is not fragile. She is intelligent, articulate and unusually mature. I expect she could challenge professors who have gone years without facing a serious conservative evangelical student. Some of those professors might discover that the caricature in their minds bears little resemblance to the thoughtful young woman sitting in front of them.

But surviving a campus is not the same thing as flourishing there.

The World Has Changed Since I Was in College

I attended college in the 1990s and law school in the early 2000s.

Universities leaned left then. Professors in the humanities were often overwhelmingly liberal. But there was still a meaningful difference between being disagreed with and being treated as morally unfit for civilized company.

There were also more places to find balance.

A conservative student studying literature or politics might be surrounded by liberals in class, then eat lunch with conservative engineering students, pre-med students, business majors or friends planning to practice tax law. Political disagreement did not automatically prevent friendship.

The progressive coalition has since moved well beyond arguments about tax rates, environmental regulation and the size of government.

An orthodox evangelical Christian now arrives on campus holding beliefs that many institutions regard not merely as incorrect, but as dangerous.

She believes that God created human beings male and female.

She believes that marriage is the lifelong union of a man and a woman.

She believes unborn children possess human dignity.

She believes religious faith is not a private psychological preference but a claim about objective reality.

Beyond those theological convictions, she may also hold political judgments common among conservative Christians: that racial discrimination cannot be cured through new racial discrimination, that capitalism has lifted billions from poverty, that Israel has a right to exist and defend itself, and that America, despite its sins, remains a nation worth loving.

At many elite campuses, each of those convictions can place her outside the boundaries of respectable opinion.

The danger is not primarily that someone will argue with her. I hope people do.

The danger is the pervasiveness of the sneering condescension.

When nearly three-quarters of the students are Democrats, only one-tenth are Republicans, and the faculty is even more ideologically uniform, the conservative evangelical student is not merely encountering another viewpoint. She is living inside an institution in which one viewpoint predominates in the classroom, the administration, the student organizations, much of the social life and the moral vocabulary used to decide who is compassionate, intelligent and decent.

That is not the rough and tumble of intellectual diversity.

It is immersion in a culture that often treats dissent as a character defect.

College Is More Than a Collection of Classes

Parents sometimes respond that none of this should matter.

“Just get the degree.”

“Keep your head down.”

“Go to class, make good grades and ignore the politics.”

But a college is not merely a building where a student completes academic transactions.

Four years between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two are profoundly formative. Students decide what they believe, what they love, what kind of work they want to do, what communities they will join and often whom they will marry.

They form friendships that may last for the rest of their lives.

They learn what kinds of people are admired and what kinds are mocked.

They absorb thousands of little signals about which beliefs can be spoken aloud and which must be disguised.

A college’s culture matters because human beings are social creatures. Even strong young adults are shaped by the people around them. Scripture does not warn that bad company corrupts good character only when the person of good character has a low SAT score.

The question is not simply whether my daughter can earn an A while disagreeing with her professor.

The question is whether she will spend four years building deep friendships with people who encourage courage, faithfulness, marriage, family, service, gratitude and hope.

Will she find a strong church?

Will she meet professors who regard Christian belief as intellectually serious?

Will there be other students who understand why faithfulness matters more than social approval?

Will she find young men she could respect, and perhaps one day marry, who share her deepest commitments?

Will her college years produce joy, wisdom and durable relationships?

Or will she pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to be treated as a morally suspect visitor inside someone else’s ideological institution?

Those are not secondary concerns. They are central to what education is.

Prestige Is Not Enough

Suppose Maggie came to me and said she wanted to attend one of the most prestigious universities in the country, whether Harvard, Yale, Brown, Stanford, Columbia, UCLA, MIT, Georgetown, Duke, Emory or Vanderbilt.

There was a time when nearly any parent would have celebrated without reservation.

I would be proud that she had earned the opportunity. I would listen carefully. I would not forbid her to go.

But I am no longer sure I would be happy about it.

I would ask what she was buying and what it would cost.

Not only in tuition, but in community.

Not only in money, but in four irreplaceable years.

Not only in intellectual challenge, but in the daily burden of being surrounded by people who may regard her most sacred beliefs as evidence of ignorance or hatred.

The U.S. News ranking would not answer those questions.

A school can possess famous professors, magnificent buildings, brilliant students and a multibillion-dollar endowment while failing to provide an intellectually open education.

It can be exceptionally difficult to enter while being remarkably easy to pass through without having one’s progressive assumptions seriously challenged.

It can confer an elite credential without producing wisdom.

At that point, what exactly are parents purchasing?

Sometimes it appears they are purchasing admission to an expensive credentialing mill where their child will be taught by people who largely agree with one another, surrounded by students who largely agree with their teachers, inside an administration that calls the resulting conformity “diversity.”

That does not look like educational excellence to me.

It looks like a very costly recipe for misery.

What the New Rankings Actually Show

U.S. News has just released its 2027 rankings of the best national universities. I went through the list school by school, with three questions in mind. What will it really cost us? Is it somewhere I would want my children to spend four years? Will they be one of many students who share their convictions, or a token?

Start with cost. Every private university in the top sixteen lists tuition and fees above $67,000 a year. The University of Chicago lists $77,955. Brown lists $77,552. Duke lists $76,375. In-state tuition and fees at the University of Tennessee are $14,024.

But the sticker price is not the real number, and this is where every family ends up looking at a different set of data. The wealthiest universities have enormous endowments and now waive tuition for families below generous income levels. A strong student from a household like mine may be offered more help by a top-twenty university than by a small Christian college she genuinely loves, because the small college has no endowment to draw from. The schools whose culture I trust most are often the ones least able to make attendance possible. The letter that matters is the financial aid offer.

Then geography. I hope my children do not head to the Northeast, and not only for cultural reasons. The number of American high school graduates has peaked. The Northeast is projected to see a 17 percent decline in high school graduates by 2041, led by New York at 27 percent and Pennsylvania at 17 percent, while the Midwest will see a 16 percent decline. The South is the only region projected to grow, by about 3 percent, driven by states like Texas, Florida and North Carolina. Colleges in shrinking regions will compete harder for fewer students, but I do not want my kids and grandkids living in high tax demographically declining states, and the alumni network that is deep doesn’t matter if it is in the wrong places.

The third thing was culture with the FIRE list in mind. About forty-five of the schools ranked through No. 148 are in the South. The top of that group is Duke, Rice, Vanderbilt, Emory, Virginia and North Carolina. In FIRE’s data, Duke students are 64 percent Democratic and 18 percent Republican. Rice and Vanderbilt are each 70 and 15. Virginia is 70 and 11. Emory is 69 and 13. Even North Carolina, the most balanced of the group, is 61 and 22. The Southern schools where a conservative student would be one of many do not appear until much further down the list: Clemson at No. 80, Baylor at No. 90, Auburn at No. 100, Tennessee at No. 109, South Carolina at No. 121. Alabama is No. 156. Ole Miss is No. 179. Arkansas is No. 191. LSU is No. 202. Mississippi State is No. 208.

When I finished, I had fewer than ten schools in the top 150 that I would be excited for my children to attend.

That should worry the universities more than it worries me. Confidence in higher education is at a historic low. The pool of eighteen-year-olds is shrinking almost everywhere except the South. Artificial intelligence is reshaping the entry-level jobs that degrees were supposed to secure. Harvard will survive all of that. The schools in real danger are the tuition-dependent colleges in the middle, which have too little endowment to buy their way out and too little distinctiveness to give families a reason to choose them. I expect a serious shakeout among those schools within the next decade, and the ones that survive will be the ones that gave parents something the rankings never measured.

Cornell made that argument in a way I read about this morning after this essay was mostly done. On September 22, 2026, a faculty committee there released a 200-page report calling this “an unprecedented crisis” for higher education, driven by artificial intelligence, collapsing federal relationships and eroding public trust. Its recommendations included rethinking Cornell’s tuition model and, notably, embracing a wider range of ideologies. When Ivy League faculty start saying that in an official report, the argument in this essay stops sounding like a conservative complaint and starts sounding like a diagnosis the institutions themselves are making.

The Encouraging Exceptions

There are signs that a few elite institutions understand the danger.

Johns Hopkins is undertaking one of the most serious efforts to restore ideological pluralism. Its president, Ron Daniels, has supported institutions and programs designed to bring together conservative, liberal and heterodox scholars. The university is developing a new School of Government and Policy, partnering with the American Enterprise Institute and deliberately recruiting professors who are willing to engage contrary views.

The effort faces substantial faculty resistance. In one national survey cited in reporting about Hopkins, only 17 percent of research faculty agreed that universities should do more to recruit professors with conservative views, while 50 percent opposed such efforts.

Still, Hopkins appears serious. Its Agora Institute has created spaces in which free-market conservatives and committed communists argue, continue talking and sometimes become friends. A new interdisciplinary program requires students to read across ideological traditions, from Adam Smith to Karl Marx, within an environment explicitly designed to permit disagreement without shaming.

That is what a university should be.

Vanderbilt has also taken steps toward institutional neutrality and open inquiry. Whether those efforts will permanently change the culture remains to be seen, but they matter.

Even Princeton, where students are 72 percent Democratic and 15 percent Republican, has something worth noting. Robert George’s James Madison Program has spent more than two decades bringing serious conservative and classical thought into one of the most progressive campuses in the country. A student who found her way into that community would not be standing alone.

Purdue offers a fuller version of the same story. Under president Mitch Daniels, Purdue adopted the Chicago Principles on free expression and froze tuition for ten straight years, saving families over a billion dollars along the way. Daniels stepped down in 2022, but he proved something worth remembering. A major research university does not have to choose between academic excellence and open inquiry. It can have both, and it can be affordable while it does.

A quieter and perhaps more consequential movement has been building for almost a decade at public universities in at least eight states. Arizona, Florida, Mississippi, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas and Utah have all created new schools, departments or institutes of civic thought, most backed by state legislatures on a bipartisan or near-bipartisan basis. Arizona State’s School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership, founded in 2017, was the first. The University of Florida now has its Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has its School of Civic Life and Leadership. These are not symbolic gestures. They hire their own faculty, design their own curricula and offer their own majors, built specifically to restore the kind of intellectual pluralism that departments of history, political science and literature have largely abandoned.

On the more radical end, a group led by Bari Weiss, Niall Ferguson, Pano Kanelos and Joe Lonsdale simply built a new university from nothing. The University of Austin enrolled its first undergraduate class in the fall of 2024, charges no tuition, accepts no government funding and is still working through the years-long accreditation process most schools finished decades ago. It is small and unproven, and it is a real risk for the families betting on it. But it exists because enough people concluded that reforming existing institutions from the inside was not moving fast enough, and decided to start over instead.

A friend deeply involved with a private university that once had a recognizably conservative identity told me he now struggles to persuade major donors to support it. Their objection is not that the school welcomes political disagreement. It is that the institution appears embarrassed by its inheritance while eagerly embracing whatever progressive identities are currently fashionable.

I have visited schools where the same tension is visible. A campus can be extraordinarily beautiful while making clear, in a hundred small ways, that the alumni who once made it distinctive are less welcome in its public identity than the ideologies currently fashionable in its admissions materials.

I do not think the answer for a school like that is to keep drifting further from what made it distinctive in the first place. I think the opposite is closer to true. The private universities willing to actually turn back toward their own roots, deliberately and without apology, are the ones likely to be rewarded by the parents and donors who are watching this play out in real time and quietly deciding where their money and their children will go instead.

Market pressure may eventually accomplish what decades of polite criticism could not. Parents, donors and students are beginning to notice that prestige without intellectual diversity is a diminished product.

Universities that relearn how to welcome disagreement may thrive.

Those that continue demanding enormous sums for ideological conformity may discover that fewer families are impressed by the name carved above the gate.

Is an Ideologically Hostile Campus a Mission Field?

Some Christian parents respond to arguments like mine with a different instinct entirely. If a campus is that ideologically uniform and that hostile to orthodox belief, maybe the most Christian thing my daughter could do is go be a light in the middle of it. Maybe a difficult campus is not a place to avoid. Maybe it is a mission field.

Some of the most fruitful Christian witness in history has happened precisely where the need was greatest and the welcome was thinnest.

But a mission field still requires a missionary who has been formed for the work. We would not hand an eighteen-year-old a scalpel and send her into an emergency room simply because the patients need help. Desire does not substitute for training. College is supposed to be part of my children’s formation, not proof that their formation is already complete.

An eighteen-year-old who is still learning to carry her convictions independently, without her family and home church in the room, is still being formed. Asking her to enter one of the most ideologically uniform campuses in the country as a missionary may confuse courage with readiness.

That does not mean my children should be sealed away from struggling, unhappy, searching people. It means the sequence matters.

Formation first. Mission second.

A young person who is still forming her own convictions is not well served by being placed, alone, in the environment most likely to test those convictions to their breaking point before they have finished setting. I would rather my children spend their college years being built into people capable of that kind of mission field work later, whether at twenty-two in graduate school, or at thirty in a career, or simply as a mature adult in whatever community they land in, than ask them to attempt it as freshmen because the opportunity happened to present itself early.

There will be time for the mission field. There is only one window for the foundation.

The Attraction of Home

Maggie has another option.

She is likely to be able to attend the University of Tennessee, the same school where she is already earning honors credit, at little or no cost.

UT is not a conservative Christian university. Its students disagree about politics, religion and nearly everything else. That is a positive feature.

But its student population looks far more like the actual state in which we live: 31 percent Democratic, 17 percent independent and 52 percent Republican. Of all the schools in FIRE’s survey, only five had a larger Republican share than the University of Tennessee, and three of those five were Hillsdale, Liberty and BYU.

Donald Trump carried Tennessee by nearly thirty points in 2024. UT’s student body, at 52 percent Republican and 31 percent Democratic, is substantially less Republican than the state that supports it. UT is not an ideological mirror of Tennessee’s electorate, much less a conservative enclave. It is simply a place where both progressives and conservatives exist in numbers large enough to speak, organize and form friendships without either group being treated as an exotic species.

A progressive student at Tennessee will meet conservatives. A conservative student will meet progressives. Students can disagree without one side possessing near-total cultural control.

UT is also not sitting on the sidelines of the national movement described above. In 2022, the university launched its own Institute of American Civics, built specifically to restore a serious, wide-ranging education in the American founding, Western political thought and the kind of open civil discourse that has largely disappeared from humanities departments elsewhere. Maggie would not be settling for an affordable option and hoping intellectual pluralism happens to show up eventually. It is already being built on her campus.

Maggie could graduate without debt. She could remain connected to her family, church and community. She could continue developing relationships with people who know her as a complete person rather than as a political category.

She would also retain enormous freedom afterward.

A student who receives an excellent undergraduate education without debt can choose graduate school, law school, missions, ministry, writing, public service or work without beginning adult life beneath a financial burden.

I graduated from college and law school without debt. That freedom shaped my life. It allowed me to pursue work that mattered to me rather than simply the work that paid the most.

The freedom to choose a calling may be worth more than a prestigious name.

I Will Let Her Choose

Maggie’s life belongs to God, not to me. The same is true of Wyatt, and of each of their siblings as their own turns come.

She is becoming an adult. I will advise her, pray for her, challenge her assumptions and help her evaluate the tradeoffs. But ultimately, she will choose.

She may decide that the academic resources, particular professors or opportunities at an elite university justify entering an overwhelmingly progressive culture.

She may relish the fight.

She may find a strong Christian community within it and become a faithful witness to people who have never encountered an evangelical Christian they could not dismiss.

I will support her as my daughter wherever she goes.

But support does not require pretending every choice is equally wise.

Parents should stop being hypnotized by rankings. We should examine political culture, intellectual freedom, spiritual life, debt, friendship, institutional character and the actual well-being of students with the same seriousness that we examine admission rates and median test scores. And we should look at the actual, publicly available data ourselves rather than take anyone’s word for it, mine included.

The narrow road is not always the road with the smallest acceptance rate.

Sometimes the broad road is the one everyone assumes a successful student must take because everyone else wants to take it.

The glossy envelopes in my mailbox are selling prestige.

I am looking for something more.

I want a place where my daughter can deepen her mind without being asked to surrender her soul. I want her challenged by strong arguments, not surrounded by fashionable certainties. I want her to encounter people who disagree with her, but also people who understand her. I want her to form friendships rooted in truth, faith, courage and joy.

I want her to graduate prepared not merely to make a living, but to live well. I want her equipped to serve in hard and spiritually depleted places after she has developed the strength and maturity to enter them without being absorbed by them.

And when I look at the top fifty schools on this year’s U.S. News list, I no longer see the obvious destination for a brilliant young woman.

I see an expensive, prestigious and increasingly unnecessary risk.

I see a recipe for misery.