Small colleges in Connecticut are a great option for students interested in a more intimate campus experience, more personal attention from excellent professors, and more immediate access to support services. Whether the focus is on the technical or on the liberal arts, small colleges give you the chance to pursue a well-rounded education while working closely with classmates and professors in a dynamic community atmosphere.
As the fourth oldest learning institute in the United States, Yale enrolls just over 15,000 students at its New Haven campus. Higher education in Connecticut includes both public and private institutions that offer associate, bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees. With 19 public schools and 20 private schools, students have a variety to choose from. Tuition for most of the state’s community colleges averages $4,000, while the cost for other public schools ranges from $8,000 to $16,000.
Students interested in psychology, economics, and communications can check out the University of Connecticut (UConn), which is home to the premier research institute for ecological psychology. Sacred Heart University, a Roman Catholic university, is known for its religious studies and business programs. And those looking for a smaller student population may want to check out Manchester Community College, which enrolls about 4000 students and offers affordable degrees in literature, biology, and social work.
Students in Connecticut can choose from a variety of higher education experiences fitting a full spectrum of budgets and career goals. Learn more and begin earning your degree from one of Connecticut’s top colleges or universities.
The following list of the best small colleges and universities in Connecticut is composed mainly of four-year undergraduate schools (though a handful also offer graduate programs). We’ve identified 11 small colleges in Connecticut. The list below of the best small colleges in Connecticut. To be included schools must fully accredited, and must have student body populations below 5,000 students.
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.
Tuition + fees
$62K
Acceptance
21%
Graduation
91%
Student body
4K
Wesleyan University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$61K
Acceptance
36%
Graduation
82%
Student body
2K
Median SAT/ACT
1374/30
Trinity College ’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$36K
Acceptance
71%
Graduation
40%
Student body
4K
Median SAT/ACT
1005/20
University of Bridgeport’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$61K
Acceptance
38%
Graduation
82%
Student body
2K
Median SAT/ACT
1380/31
Connecticut College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Acceptance
20%
Graduation
86%
Student body
1K
Median SAT/ACT
1305/27
United States Coast Guard Academy’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$12K
Acceptance
81%
Graduation
51%
Student body
5K
Western Connecticut State University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$9K
Student body
<1K
Charter Oak State College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$36K
Acceptance
74%
Graduation
59%
Student body
<1K
Mitchell College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$12K
Acceptance
70%
Graduation
56%
Student body
4K
Eastern Connecticut State University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$36K
Acceptance
81%
Graduation
49%
Student body
1K
Median SAT/ACT
970/19
Albertus Magnus College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$43K
Acceptance
78%
Graduation
56%
Student body
2K
University of Saint Joseph ’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Many of our 2022 undergraduate focused rankings look considerably different than 2021. That’s because we took a fundamentally different apporach. For 2021 we utiulized our Concentrated Influence algorithm, designed to take away the size advantage larger schools have when we rank their faculty and alumni’s academic influence. Concentrated influence highlights smaller schools that are proportionally as successful as larger universities at cultivating influential alumni and faculty.