Top Schools for Activists

Looking to even change the world? Even if that just means changing your little slice of the college community, Newsweek ranks the 25 best schools where activists can find comfort.

Methodology: To find the best 25 schools for activists we used four metrics: each college’s score for diversity and campus strictness from College Prowler (a higher campus strictness score indicates a less-strict campus culture, and takes into account administration leniency toward political activism); to measure the overall political knowledge and political culture of the student body we tallied the percent of total bachelor’s degrees awarded for 2009 in political science or government, with data from the National Center for Education Statistics; and to measure the opportunity for activism, we measure the number of registered organizations on campus as a percentage of the undergraduate population, with data from CollegeView. Each category was weighted equally.