Best Christian Colleges in Arkansas 2025

Badge for BEST IN ARKANSAS CHRISTIAN COLLEGES

By Dr. James Barham
Reviewed By Jenn Finley

Published: Mar 8, 2021
Updated: Nov 6, 2024

Key Takeaways

There are 10 Christian colleges in Arkansas, and both are well-known for their academic excellence, commitment to the Christian faith, close-knit community of students, faculty and staff members, and alumni.
These Christian colleges provide a wide range of benefits for their students, from quality education to spiritual formation.
Accredited Christian colleges in Arkansas offer financial aid options for qualified students.

Table of Contents

10 Best Christian Colleges in Arkansas in 2025

Hendrix College
Harding University
Ouachita Baptist University
Philander Smith University
Arkansas Baptist College
+3
Lyon College
–1
University of the Ozarks
Crowley's Ridge College
–2
Central Baptist College
Williams Baptist University

2025 Ranking Update

Our Influence Ranking Engine™ leverages machine learning to track the real-world influence of colleges and universities over time. Below you’ll see which schools gained or lost ground for the 2025 school year.

The top 4 schools in our 2025 ranking of the best Christian colleges in Arkansas remain unchanged from last year.

Hendrix College is rejoining the Southern Collegiate Athletic Conference (SCAC) in fall 2025. This strategic move aligns the college with institutions that share its commitment to academic excellence and athletic character, fostering a community that integrates faith and learning.

The College of Pharmacy at Harding University now offers an accelerated 3.5-year Doctor of Pharmacy (Pharm.D.) program, allowing students to enter the workforce sooner while emphasizing service and professionalism.

Additionally, the Carr College of Nursing has expanded its Master of Science in Nursing (MSN) Family Nurse Practitioner program, providing a hybrid curriculum that combines online lectures with on-campus intensives, catering to the needs of working professionals.

Ouachita Baptist University has expanded its Graduate and Professional Studies programs, including a Master of Arts in Counseling and a Master of Science in Exercise Science, both designed to integrate faith-based education with practical, accelerated pathways in health sciences. Additionally, Ouachita has enhanced its online learning platforms to provide more flexible and accessible education options for students.

The following list of the best Christian schools consists entirely of colleges and universities that offer four-year undergraduate degrees. We’ve identified 10 Christian colleges in Arkansas. In order to be included in this ranking list of best Christian colleges and universities, a school must self-identify as Christian, be fully accredited, and offer a broad range of bachelor degree programs.

How do we determine Arkansas's best Christian colleges and universities?

Methodology

The people affiliated with a school are ultimately what make it great! If you are serious about finding the best colleges and universities for a bachelor’s degree, you should be asking where the most influential professors are teaching and whether their graduates are themselves advancing the school’s reputation for academic excellence in their fields of study.

Most ranking sites rely on an opaque combination of reputation surveys and arbitrary performance metrics. Concentrated Influence provides a ranking that is freer from bias, insulated from manipulation, and reflective of real-world educational outcomes.

To rank the influence of schools, we first determine the influence of scholars and professionals based on the number of citations and publications they have had over the past 10 years. In addition to publications and citations, we consider the web links to and from these sources, and the page views of those sources. We then match the influential people to their alma maters and institutions of employment, so that their influence is attributed to those schools. Our machine-learning Influence Ranking algorithm produces a numerical score of academic achievements, merits, and citations across Wikipedia, wikidata, Crossref, Semantic Scholar and an ever-growing body of data. If you are interested in exploring how and why we rank by influence, explore our methodology in more depth.