The worst colleges for LGBTQ+ students revealed in new ranking

The list of colleges with policies targeting LGBTQ+ students is increasing

A new ranking from the nonprofit organisation Campus Pride lists 193 college and university campuses in the United States that are deemed unsafe for LGBTQ+ students.

The 193 schools listed are an increase over the 2021 ranking, which only included 180 schools. To appear on the list, a college or university must have a past history of discrimination against LGBTQ+ students, staff members, or faculty and also apply for an exemption from Title IX — the federal law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex.

Several of the colleges and universities listed in the ranking have more than 15,000 students. Those schools include Baylor University in Texas, Brigham Young University (BYU) in Utah, and Liberty University in Virginia. All of those schools, as well as the vast majority of schools on the list, have Christian religious affiliations.

The majority of the schools in the ranking are small colleges and universities with religious affiliations ranging from the Catholic church to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints to Baptist, Presbyterian, and Evangelical churches. Yeshiva University in New York, an Orthodox Jewish university, also made the list.

The colleges and universities on the list span each geographic region of the country; the few states not represented by schools on the list include the New England states of Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine.

The severity of the institutional discrimination LGBTQ+ students face differs at each school. Yeshiva University filed a request with the Supreme Court to block a lower court ruling requiring it to recognise an LGBTQ+ student group earlier this year, while BYU was briefly the subject of a Department of Education probe into a policy banning homosexual relationships at the school.

Campus Pride also maintains an index of LGBTQ+ friendly colleges and universities across the country.

The update to the list of hostile schools comes as LGBTQ+ students, particularly transgender students, have been under attack from Republican state governments this year. As of April, state governments were on track to set a new record for the number of anti-transgender bills passed in a single year.