Small colleges in DC 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.
The following list of the best small colleges and universities in DC is composed mainly of four-year undergraduate schools (though a handful also offer graduate programs). We’ve identified 8 small colleges in DC. The list below of the 30 best small colleges in DC. 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
$52K
Acceptance
82%
Graduation
74%
Student body
5K
The Catholic University of America’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$18K
Acceptance
63%
Graduation
44%
Student body
1K
Median SAT/ACT
915/16
Gallaudet University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$6K
Graduation
23%
Student body
3K
University of the District of Columbia’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$25K
Acceptance
96%
Graduation
46%
Student body
1K
Trinity Washington University’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.
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