RALEIGH — The conservative-leaning Heritage Foundation has rolled out a new tool for students and parents to “choose a college with confidence.”
“Universities should promote freedom, opportunity, and upward mobility, fostering free expression and open academic inquiry. They should be intellectually rigorous and provide students with a solid return on investment,” the Heritage website states. “American colleges and universities should reclaim their place as the most renowned academic institutions in the world. This site highlights colleges and universities that exemplify these goals along with those institutions that need to reorient themselves toward academic excellence, free expression, and ideological balance.”
The website uses a data visualization of colleges across the country using a rating scale of “Great Option,” “Worth Considering” and “Not Recommended.”
“Great Option” universities offer intellectually rigorous environments with minimal DEI administrative influence, strong academic freedom, competitive post-graduation outcomes, and a balanced approach to ideological discourse.
Institutions deemed “Worth Considering” provide solid academic programs with designated centers for rigorous study, though not as consistently conservative-friendly as “Great Option” schools, and often feature specialized academic initiatives that promote intellectual diversity.
Universities that are “Not Recommended” demonstrate significant administrative ideological bias, weak core curricular standards, limited viewpoint diversity, and poor return on investment through lower graduation rates and diminished post-graduation income potential.
Around 280 colleges and universities are currently on the Heritage map, which includes seven schools in North Carolina out of the 59 four-year higher education institutions in the state.
Two of the seven are considered a “Great Option”: Belmont Abbey College, which is located in Belmont and is the only college in the state affiliated with the Catholic Church, and Thales College, located outside of Raleigh in Wake Forest.
Three schools on the list are all UNC System Schools rated as “Worth Considering”: NC State, UNC Chapel Hill and Western Carolina University.
The final two on Heritage’s list for North Carolina are Duke and Wake Forest. They fall under the “Not Recommended” category.
Heritage Foundation’s Jonathan Butcher said the goal of the map project is to give parents guidance on what schools they could feel safe or have confidence in sending their child to, as well as feeling like their child would get a solid foundation in academics and values.
“We started by looking at where else have some of these institutions been rated and why, and what were they ranked and why,” said Butcher. “And then we said, “Well, if we were going to give recommendations to a parent, what would we tell them?”
Butcher said that two sources they looked at in creating the map were school information and rankings from the Association of Council for Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).
He added they also looked at what those types of rankings don’t take into consideration.
“In New England, in particular, some of the colleges that you know tend to be called selective and get high marks on, say, the U.S. News & World Report rankings,” Butcher said. “We point out that some of these schools actually don’t do well when it comes to free speech on campus or the way in which, say, Jewish students were treated last spring, and whether that actually represents the protecting the pursuit of truth.”
Butcher said the initial map will be added to as the project progresses and that they plan to add 1,000 schools in the next release.
