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Quid · Annual Report · 2026

Higher Education
Social Engagement

Every Division I and Division II school, ranked on what its own accounts earned across Instagram, Facebook, X, TikTok and YouTube.

June 1, 2025 – May 31, 2026  ·  6 Sections

QUID · OWNED SOCIAL · DIVISION I & II · FIVE CHANNELS · Edition MMXXVI

What Wemeasured

Owned accounts only, Jun 1, 2025 – May 31, 2026. The 2025 edition covered 667 schools over Jun 1, 2024 – May 31, 2025.

Schools ranked
663
667 in the 2025 report
Posts published
577.6K
575K in the 2025 report
Combined audience
137.6M
followers and subscribers, five channels
ChannelSchools postingPosts EngagementsPer post Median eng. rate
Instagram660149.6K165.1M1,1032.10%
Facebook656223.6K56.3M2520.33%
X561121.2K5.3M440.05%
TikTok45139K50.6M1,2956.27%
YouTube61144.2K2M440.27%

YouTube is new this year and counts toward the rank: 611 schools posted 44.2K videos earning 2M engagements. The 2025 edition ranked four channels and published no YouTube column, so its position on that channel had to be reconstructed; see how the ranking works, below.

TikTok is still where the engagement is, and a large minority still aren't there. Just 451 of 663 schools posted to TikTok, yet each post earned 1,295 engagements on average: roughly 5x a Facebook post. Instagram carries the volume; X earns 44 per post.

How The Rankingworks

Each school is ranked inside its own division on five channels: Instagram, Facebook, X, TikTok and, new this year, YouTube. On every channel a school is placed twice, once on total engagement and once on engagement rate per post, and the two placings are averaged into one channel rank. The overall rank is the average of the five channel ranks, so a school that wins everywhere beats one that wins loudly in a single place.

A school that published nothing on a channel takes that channel's tied-last rank, the same convention the printed edition uses when a whole column shares one number. Engagement comes from each school's own accounts: nobody is credited for what other people posted about them.

The 2025 edition had no YouTube column

It ranked four channels, so a five-channel position for last year does not exist and has been rebuilt here: each school's four published 2025 channel ranks are combined with a YouTube rank measured over 8.1 of that year's 12 months (2024-09-26 to 2025-05-31), which is as far back as the underlying data reaches. Every table therefore shows two prior-year numbers and labels them: 2025 (pub.), the rank the printed report gave, and 2025 (5-ch), the rebuilt one the change is measured against.

Does the comparison hold?

Adding YouTube brings a fifth channel into the ranking. This edition’s ranking method was built to accommodate the new data set, while following previous editions' methods in spirit, and the checks below test whether it does: the order holds broadly, with real movement still showing through.

CheckDivision IDivision II
Schools in both editions363297
Correlation with the rebuilt 2025 rank0.8080.77
Correlation with the published 2025 rank0.7790.706
Median places moved3731
Within 25 places of last year38.6%41.4%
2025 top 25 still in the top 2510 of 2510 of 25

A correlation near 0 would mean the two years measure different things and no rank change could be trusted. At 0.808 and 0.77 the order is broadly preserved while real movement still shows through.

A rank change only means something if the field is the same size. Division I holds 364 schools this year and held 364 last year; Division II holds 299 against 303, because four Pennsylvania and Indiana institutions merged and one closed. The gap is small: restating last year's positions in this year's field moves no school more than 2 places.

Full rankings

Division Iunlock the data

All 364 Division I schools ranked, the top-ten spotlights with the posts that earned it, and every school's move against last year. One submission opens every section of the report.

Full rankings

Division IIunlock the data

All 299 Division II schools ranked, the top-ten spotlights with the posts that earned it, and every school's move against last year. One submission opens every section of the report.

Full rankings

What Changedunlock the data

The schools that climbed and fell furthest this year, measured like-for-like so a smaller field can't flatter the numbers. One submission opens every section of the report.

How This Wasbuilt

Where the numbers come from, what they count, and what to be careful about when reading them.

  • Source. Each school's own Instagram, Facebook, X, TikTok and YouTube accounts : the posts the school published itself, not posts other people wrote about it.
  • Scope. 663 Division I and Division II colleges and universities, ranked within their own division.
  • Time frame. Jun 1, 2025 – May 31, 2026, a complete twelve months. The prior edition covered Jun 1, 2024 – May 31, 2025, the twelve months immediately before.
  • How it's measured. On each channel a school is placed once on total engagement and once on engagement rate per post; those two placings are averaged into a channel rank, and the five channel ranks are averaged into the overall rank. Every post a school's own accounts published in the window counts, with no minimum or maximum number of posts. A school that posted nothing on a channel shares that channel's last place.
  • Comparing the two years. The prior edition ranked four channels and published no YouTube column, so the five-channel 2025 position shown here is rebuilt: its four published channel ranks plus a YouTube rank measured over 8.1 of that year's twelve months, which is as far back as the data reaches. Both numbers appear in every table, the published one and the rebuilt one. The rebuild is an estimate, so small changes should be read as movement within the noise. Restating last year's positions in this year's field would move no school more than 2 places, so the tables compare against the rebuilt rank directly.
  • Example posts. Each school's highest-engagement posts from the window, linked to the original. X posts are shown with text recovered separately, because the engagement source withholds the wording of posts on that platform.
  • Finding the accounts. A school's accounts are discovered from its website, and a school that does not link a platform from its own pages can look absent when it is simply posting somewhere the crawler never saw. Every blank cell was therefore checked by hand: against the handles the school already uses on its other channels, and against its own social-media directory. 187 verified accounts were added, 89 on TikTok and 98 across the other four. An earlier version of these rankings counted only the accounts linked from each school's own website and left these out; adding them moved some schools significantly. Outside TikTok, 42 blanks remain, and they mean an account could not be verified rather than that the school has none; TikTok's 105 are explained below.
  • Checking the account belongs to the school. An account is accepted only when its own profile name identifies the institution. That is how a hospital system, a church, and a marching band were kept out of this edition. Two things defeat the test. A college whose address redirects to a second site can expose no social links on the host held on file, so every channel has to be guessed from its name instead. And when that name is a single common word, an unrelated organization's profile can carry the same word and pass. Providence College met both conditions: the site on file was a subdomain with no links on it, and the TikTok account recorded against it belonged to a health system also called Providence. All five accounts were identified from the college's own footer and corrected, which moved it from 346th to 58th. A rank is only as sound as the account behind it, so every channel rank in the tables names the account it was measured on when a cell is hovered.
  • Why a channel is blank. Absence is often policy rather than neglect: at least 41 of the schools without a TikTok account are barred from running one. Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Montana, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas and Virginia direct their public institutions to keep TikTok off state devices and official channels, and the same applies to the service academies under Department of Defense rules. Those schools sit in the tied-last group because they are not allowed to compete on the channel, which is a different fact from choosing not to.
  • Notes. Engagement rate is engagement measured against audience size, so a small school with an active following can outrank a large one. Seven rows from last year's report belong to institutions that have since merged into three (Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, Lock Haven University of Pennsylvania, PennWest Edinboro, Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania, Mansfield University of Pennsylvania, PennWest California, PennWest Clarion), and one school closed, so they are absent rather than fallen. TikTok, X and YouTube reach far fewer schools than the rest, which makes their tied-last groups large.