The Daily Northwestern's Fall 2025 Poll
From Sept. 29 to Oct. 6, The Daily polled the Northwestern undergraduate student body on a variety of topics.
Here's what we found.
Who gets into Northwestern? Who has cheated in a relationship? Who defines the college experience?
Who are… (N)U?
University campuses today sit at a crossroads of free expression, student activism and a federal administration seeking to influence higher education. At NU, students navigate a politically charged climate amid a federal funding freeze and tensions surrounding free speech on campus.
But beyond the headlines, students continue to deal with the everyday realities of college life: relationships, mental health and balancing academic performance with personal well-being. At the same time, they adjust to the financial burden of attending university, worried about rent, tuition and their future job market.
In The Daily’s Fall 2025 poll, conducted Sept. 29 through Oct. 6, we asked NU students about all of that and more.
— Grace Wu, Polling Editor
Responses to the Fall 2025 Campus Poll were collected Sept. 29 through Oct. 6. The poll was administered via a digital form distributed through social media, email lists and in-person polling stations. A total of 727 undergraduate students completed the survey. Data analysis was conducted using Python.
As with the Spring 2025 Campus Poll, results were weighted to better reflect the overall undergraduate population. Weighting adjustments were applied by class year, gender and school to correct for sampling biases. Since the Fall 2024 Campus Poll was not weighted, comparisons to last year may reflect methodological changes rather than actual opinion shifts.
While weighting improves demographic balance, it does not make the sample random or fully representative across all dimensions. As with all public opinion surveys, this poll remains subject to potential sampling bias. However, the wide range of polling topics aimed to mitigate participation bias from students with particularly strong views on specific issues.
Many results are broken down by demographic group; however, data are not reported for groups with fewer than 60 respondents. One question was removed due to recent changes in federal policies related to the Israel-Hamas war, as the results may no longer accurately reflect students' current views. Some open responses were also aggregated into existing or new categories as part of the data cleaning process. Besides anonymous write-in comments, The Daily does not publish individual response data.
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