The Wall Street Journal’s 2025 ranking of US colleges and universities was released on 6th September. For the first time, it included questions to measure the extent to which students feel their time at university has supported their character development.
Researchers from the Oxford Character Project and Harvard’s Human Flourishing Program worked with the paper’s ranking team to suggest questions that focus on character strengths that will help students to make a meaningful contribution to society. The character survey only makes up 4% of each university's overall score, so it is a day of small beginnings but nonetheless a positive step towards a brighter future.
As part of its yearly ranking, the Wall Street Journal surveyed over 60,000 students at 500 universities in the US. The paper used a short survey designed by the Oxford Character Project researchers in collaboration with Prof. Tyler VanderWeele and Dr Kate Long from Harvard’s Human Flourishing Program. The survey focuses on character strengths that will help students to make a meaningful contribution to society and includes emphasis on hope, wisdom and justice, as well as the character needed to make a difference for good in the world and the resilience to pursue that good even when it is difficult. These were selected due to their prominence on university websites and in university advertising materials. For example, Princeton, which came top overall and performed well on character, has a strong emphasis on “commitment to service” and “leading lives of purpose".
Oxford has its own longstanding emphasis on character and values, as it states in its education mission statement: "Through a commitment to the personal education of each student, we will provide a quality of education and experience which equips students with the values, skills and intellectual discipline that will enable them to make a positive contribution to society." A wider recognition of the importance of character in higher education is much needed in our times, and the inclusion of character in this ranking can be considered a major milestone in that direction.
To learn more about the methodology used to measure character development and/or how to embed character in your educational institutions, please write to Dr Edward Brooks (edward.brooks@politics.ox.ac.uk).