Out on Campus

Why this exists

For eighteen years, the Campus Pride Index was the guide to LGBTQ+ life on US campuses. It shut down in late 2025, and its old web addresses now serve spam — so we link only to archived copies. Around the same time, the government's list of Title IX religious exemptions disappeared from ed.gov, and state anti-DEI laws began closing campus LGBTQ+ centers. Out on Campus rebuilds the picture from the original public records, while they still exist.

Who's included

Every US four-year public or private non-profit college with at least 1,000 students (federal IPEDS enrollment data, 2023–24): schools in total. For-profit colleges and smaller schools are excluded.

How the score works

Every school starts at zero and earns points for what it actually offers. It can also lose points — but only for documented anti-LGBTQ+ records, never for missing data.

What we score	Points	Where the data comes from
Campus policy & support — up to 40
A professionally-staffed LGBTQ+ center	10	Consortium of Higher Education LGBT Resource Professionals directory (2025–26)
Gender-inclusive housing	8	Beemyn, Trans-Supportive Campus Policies (Jan 2026)
A written policy protecting trans students from discrimination	6	Beemyn (Jul 2026)
Student health insurance covering transition care	6 (3 if hormones only)	Beemyn (Jul 2024)
Chosen name (3) and pronouns (2) on official records	5	Beemyn (Sep 2024)
Old Campus Pride star rating, where one exists	5	Internet Archive snapshots — the year is shown on each school
State & city environment — up to 25
How good the state's LGBTQ+ laws are	15	Movement Advancement Project Equality Maps (May 2026)
How LGBTQ+-friendly the local city government is	10	HRC Municipal Equality Index 2025 — the campus city, or the nearest scored city within 25 miles, or the state median (each school shows which was used)
Scene & community — up to 20
LGBTQ+ venues nearby (OpenStreetMap-tagged, within 2 and 10 miles)	12	OpenStreetMap (Aug 2026)
A PFLAG support group within 25 miles	8	PFLAG chapter directory (Aug 2026)
Student voice — bonus, up to +15
Princeton Review's student-voted "LGBTQ-friendly" top 25, scaled by rank	+15…+0.6	The Best 391 Colleges, 2026 edition
Penalties for documented records — capped at −25
A Title IX religious exemption covering sexual orientation or gender identity, filed 2013 or later. The letters themselves ask to be exempt from the rules "to the extent they are interpreted to reach gender identity or sexual orientation discrimination"	−15	Dept of Education civil-rights correspondence — all 311 letters since 2013 machine-read, including scanned ones; HRC's Hidden Discrimination report (2015); Campus Pride's exemption tags
A place on Campus Pride's "Worst List", with its stated reason	−10	Final full snapshot, May 2024 (Internet Archive)
Princeton Review's student-voted "LGBTQ-unfriendly" top 25	−5	2026 edition

Three fairness rules built into the maths. If Campus Pride never rated a school, that indicator's 5 points are spread across the other campus-policy items — nobody loses points for never having been rated. A quarter of the score reflects the laws around a campus, on purpose: students live under state law as much as campus policy, so a well-run school in a hostile state ranks lower than its own policies alone would suggest — the per-pillar columns show that split for every school. And displayed scores stop at zero, while the ordering keeps counting below zero.

The least-friendly list runs on receipts

A school can only appear on the least-friendly list if there's a documented record: an exemption letter in the federal files whose own text covers sexual orientation or gender identity, a place on Campus Pride's Worst List with its stated reason, or a spot on Princeton Review's student-voted unfriendly list. Being small, rural, or far from nightlife can lower a score — but it can never put a school on that list.

Hate crimes are shown, but never scored

Each school's entry shows the anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes it reported under the Clery Act (2022–24). We deliberately don't score them: campuses where students trust the reporting process record more incidents, and a zero can mean silence rather than safety. Read them as context, not as a ranking.

What to keep in mind

• The exemption list is a floor, not a full count. Since a 2020 rule change, religious colleges don't have to file a letter to claim an exemption. The letters on record are the ones we can prove; there may be more schools operating the same way quietly. The government's own index pages were deleted in 2025 — we rebuilt them from the Internet Archive and the letter PDFs still on ed.gov, and machine-read all 311 letters filed since 2013.
• Campus Pride stars are historical. They're archived self-assessments from 2015–2025 (each school shows its year), worth at most 5 of 100 points.
• OpenStreetMap undercounts venues in some cities. It's community-maintained. That's why venue counts are labelled as OSM-tagged, capped, and worth only 12 points of 100.
• The city score covers 507 cities. Where a campus town isn't scored, we use the nearest scored city within 25 miles, or the state median — each school shows which basis was used.
• Missing from a list is scored as not having the policy. That's deliberate and conservative, but it can understate small schools whose policies were never submitted to the national registries. Every school's entry shows how many of the six policy sources list it — and schools can get counted in the next edition by submitting to Beemyn's project and the Consortium's directory.
• Women's colleges are imperfectly served by these indicators. Housing registries and staffed-center criteria map poorly onto women's colleges, so schools with strong LGBTQ+ communities (Smith is the clearest example) can score lower than their reputations suggest. Beemyn separately tracks trans admissions policies at women's colleges; we link it, but don't score it.
• Only the ~391 schools Princeton Review surveys can gain or lose points from the student-voice item; for everyone else it's simply not part of the score.
• No national list of sexual-orientation-specific campus policies exists any more — Beemyn's lists track gender-identity policies, so that's what the policy pillar can measure.
• Every fuzzy name-match was reviewed by hand when joining the twelve sources to federal school IDs; unmatched entries were checked to be schools outside this universe.

Sources

• US Dept of Education — IPEDS 2024, College Scorecard (Jun 2026), Campus Safety & Security / Clery Act (calendar 2022–24), Office for Civil Rights Title IX exemption correspondence (letters live on ed.gov; indexes via Internet Archive)
• Genny Beemyn, Trans-Supportive Campus Policies (successor to the Campus Pride Trans Policy Clearinghouse)
• Consortium of Higher Education LGBT Resource Professionals center directory
• Movement Advancement Project, LGBTQ Equality Maps (accessed Aug 2026)
• Human Rights Campaign Municipal Equality Index 2025; HRC, Hidden Discrimination (2015)
• Princeton Review, The Best 391 Colleges 2026 edition — LGBTQ-friendly / LGBTQ-unfriendly student-survey lists
• Campus Pride Index and Worst List via the Internet Archive (the live campuspride.org domains have been hijacked by spam operators and are never linked here)
• © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL); PFLAG chapter directory; US Census Bureau place gazetteer

Cite this study

Out on Campus: The LGBTQ+ College Index 2026. erobella.com, August 2026. erobella.com/research/out-on-campus — full dataset and methodology on this page.

Fair question. Erobella is a proudly progressive company, and LGBTQ+ rights matter to us — this is far from our first work in the space. Our dedicated data & research team publishes open studies all year round, including the annual Sexually Liberal Cities list and the UK LGBTQ+-Friendly University Index. We publish pieces like this because honest information about safety and belonging matters to our community — and because nobody else was going to rebuild this dataset after the Campus Pride Index disappeared.

Everything here is free — no paywall, no sign-up — for students, journalists, researchers and advocates alike, and we plan to refresh the index as new data lands.

Spot an issue? If you see something wrong — a policy we've missed, a flag you dispute, a broken link — please let us know. We review every submission and update the rankings where the evidence supports it.

With thanks to the people who kept this data alive: Genny Beemyn, the Consortium of Higher Education LGBT Resource Professionals, the Movement Advancement Project, the Human Rights Campaign, PFLAG, and OpenStreetMap's volunteer mappers.

And if you're an LGBTQ+ student who needs someone to talk to, The Trevor Project is there 24/7 — thetrevorproject.org or 1-866-488-7386.