Looking for America’s friendliest LGBTQ+ universities? In the U.S., 1,718 four-year colleges were polled.
Schools in the Southern states didn’t make the top ten. Portland State and Pace were ahead of Yale, Stanford, and Princeton. The most LGBTQ+ unfriendly university in America is Harding University in Arkansas.
According to data from 12 public sources, Out on Campus: The LGBTQ+ College Index 2026, published by Erobella, a proudly progressive European adult-industry platform, New York University is the most LGBTQ+-friendly university in the U.S. NYU scores 84.3 out of 100, ahead of Johns Hopkins (83.6) and Harvard (83.2). New York University is one of only a handful of universities in the country to hold every single indicator the index measured. They measured each school by: a professionally staffed LGBTQ+ centre, gender-inclusive housing, a written policy protecting trans students from discrimination, student health insurance covering transition care, and chosen name and pronouns on official records. NYU finishes near-perfect on the HRC Municipal Equality Index. It is one of the strongest state legal environments in the country and has 37 LGBTQ+ venues within ten miles of campus.
Clery Act figures are published for every school but are deliberately excluded from the score; campuses where students trust the reporting process record more incidents, and a zero can mean silence rather than safety.
Universities are measured by how much they affect day-to-day student life; every school starts at zero. Each bar shows where a college earns its points across five different categories. For example, policy is worth 40 points. It covers concrete campus provisions, like a professionally staffed LGBTQ+ centre, gender-inclusive housing, a written non-discrimination policy covering trans students, health insurance that covers transition care, and chosen name and pronouns on official records.
Below are the rankings for different universities and what makes the top ten unusual.
██ Policy 40 ██ Law 25 ██ Scene 20 ██ Student vote 15 ██ Penalties 25
| 01 | New York University New York, NY | ████████████████████████████████ | 84.3 |
| 02 | Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, MD | ████████████████████████████████ | 83.6 |
| 03 | Harvard University Cambridge, MA | ███████████████████████████████ | 83.2 |
| 04 | University of Washington Seattle, WA | ███████████████████████████████ | 83.0 |
| 05 | Tufts University Medford, MA | ███████████████████████████████ | 82.8 |
| 06 | Portland State University Portland, OR | ███████████████████████████████ | 81.9 |
| 07 | University of California–San Francisco San Francisco, CA | ██████████████████████████████ | 81.8 |
| 08 | Pace University New York, NY | ██████████████████████████████ | 81.4 |
| 09 | Emerson College Boston, MA | ███████████████████████████████ | 81.0 |
| 10 | Columbia University New York, NY | ██████████████████████████████ | 80.7 |
What makes the top ten unusual
Across all 1,718 colleges:
| 243 | run a professionally staffed LGBTQ+ centre — roughly one in seven. |
| 430 | offer gender-inclusive housing. |
| 176 | cover gender-affirming care in student health insurance — around one in ten. |
| 783 | anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes were reported under the Clery Act between 2022 and 2024, across 334 campuses. |
