Liberal arts colleges are a great option for students seeking a well-rounded education in an intimate campus setting. The best liberal arts colleges in Florida offer a diverse selection of degree programs with opportunities for a highly individualized educational experience.
Coming in under the national tuition average at $6,360, Florida’s colleges and universities make earning your degree affordable. Prospective students in Florida can choose from 40 public and 50 private colleges that award associate, bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in fields like anthropology, nursing, law, religious studies, and earth sciences. Nearly 40 colleges and universities in Florida offer online degrees that provide extra flexibility for educational opportunities. With over 165,000 students across eight campuses and 21 outreach centers, Miami Dade College is the largest public college in the state with a tuition of $3,000.
Find college admissions consultants in your state.
Students seeking a religious school can choose from 21 colleges and universities that are grounded in Judeo-Christian, Catholic, Seventh-day Adventist, and Christian principals. Ranked as the top two schools, the University of Florida (UF) and Florida State University (FSU) both have large student populations, with just over 45,000 at UF and just under 39,000 as FSU. Both are also affordable, with tuition at $6,000 and $7,000, respectively.
At $50,000, the University of Miami is the most expensive private college in the state and has graduated influential people, such as Gene Roddenberry, Sylvester Stallone, and Dwayne The Rock
Johnson. Florida also offers its nursing students up to $4,000 in loan forgiveness through their Nursing Student Loan Forgiveness Program.
Coastal cities, sandy beaches, orange groves, and vibrant flowers — it’s no wonder Florida is called The Sunshine State. Home to the famous Everglades National Park and Disney World, Florida also boasts 90 higher education institutes.
With so many options and in such a beautiful setting, Florida has a lot to offer higher education students. Check out Florida’s best degree programs and top career paths.
Related: Differences between research universities and teaching colleges
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.
A liberal arts college is a school that puts a premium on undergraduate studies and offers a broad range of subjects for students to study. A college of liberal arts typically provides smaller class sizes, more direct engagement with professors, and, most importantly, the opportunity to sample a wide range of subject areas on the way to a bachelor’s degree. We’ve identified 57 liberal arts universities in Florida. To be ranked among the 25 best liberal arts colleges in Florida, schools must fully accredited institutions.
Tuition + fees
$55K
Acceptance
61%
Graduation
81%
Student body
3K
Rollins College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$51K
Acceptance
81%
Graduation
64%
Student body
4K
Stetson University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$6K
Acceptance
58%
Graduation
48%
Student body
10K
Median SAT/ACT
1170/25
University of West Florida’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$7K
Acceptance
70%
Graduation
64%
Student body
<1K
Median SAT/ACT
1270/28
New College of Florida’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$3K
Graduation
33%
Student body
45K
Miami Dade College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$39K
Acceptance
50%
Graduation
68%
Student body
3K
Median SAT/ACT
1192/26
Florida Southern College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$48K
Acceptance
69%
Graduation
65%
Student body
2K
Median SAT/ACT
1185/26
Eckerd College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$42K
Acceptance
78%
Graduation
51%
Student body
4K
Median SAT/ACT
1035/21
Jacksonville University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$2K
Graduation
44%
Student body
34K
Valencia College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$31K
Acceptance
56%
Graduation
60%
Student body
10K
Median SAT/ACT
1175/25
University of Tampa’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$25K
Acceptance
92%
Graduation
53%
Student body
1K
Median SAT/ACT
1135/24
Ave Maria University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$6K
Acceptance
77%
Graduation
53%
Student body
13K
Median SAT/ACT
1135/23
Florida Gulf Coast University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$26K
Acceptance
73%
Graduation
50%
Student body
10K
Saint Leo University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$26K
Graduation
44%
Student body
28K
Full Sail University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$3K
Graduation
35%
Student body
27K
Broward College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$3K
Graduation
53%
Student body
11K
Santa Fe College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$3K
Graduation
33%
Student body
19K
St. Petersburg College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$2K
Graduation
39%
Student body
9K
Tallahassee Community College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$3K
Graduation
37%
Student body
11K
Florida SouthWestern State College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$33K
Acceptance
60%
Graduation
35%
Student body
3K
Median SAT/ACT
990/19
St. Thomas University ’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$41K
Acceptance
79%
Graduation
59%
Student body
3K
Median SAT/ACT
1075/23
Lynn University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$3K
Graduation
43%
Student body
10K
Daytona State College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$3K
Graduation
43%
Student body
11K
Indian River State College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$3K
Graduation
47%
Student body
12K
Seminole State College of Florida’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$3K
Graduation
40%
Student body
17K
Florida State College at Jacksonville’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$27K
Acceptance
54%
Graduation
49%
Student body
<1K
Warner University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$30K
Acceptance
38%
Graduation
40%
Student body
<1K
Median SAT/ACT
975/18
Webber International University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$3K
Graduation
49%
Student body
1K
Chipola College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$17K
Acceptance
38%
Graduation
35%
Student body
1K
Florida Memorial University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$15K
Acceptance
61%
Graduation
28%
Student body
<1K
Hodges University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
In pursuing a bachelor’s degree, you will need to choose between three kinds of schools: research universities, liberal arts colleges, and online colleges.
Research universities are colleges and universities whose faculty are active in research and publishing. These schools offer a wide array of doctoral programs, especially in the sciences. They tend to be big, with tens of thousands of students.
Do you prefer a larger university setting, such as largest public university in your state? Research universities are typically big, offering degrees in many different disciplines. Is a big high-powered research environment the thing for you. If not, you should think about a liberal arts college. In deciding on an undergraduate institution, ask yourself what sort of environment will best help you to be happy and excel.
Often referred to as “teaching colleges” liberal arts colleges put a premium on undergraduate studies and offers a broad range of subjects for students to study. A college of liberal arts typically provides smaller class sizes, more direct engagement with professors, and, most importantly, the opportunity to sample a wide range of subject areas on the way to a bachelor’s degree.
Online colleges are typically the same colleges and universities you could attend in-person, but for certain degree programs the college or unviersity has made the degree programs available to be completed online. For over 5 million students, online degree programs allow students to earn their degrees in the most flexible format available. Online degrees are as respected as the on-campus degress you could earn from the same schools. There’s usually no disctinction between the two degrees, and your degree and transcript will not say that the degree was earned online. Online degree programs are offered by a vast majority of colleges and universities, and the number of offering continues to grow. Whehter you are searching for an associate, bachelor’s, master’s, or doctorate, there’s a good chance you can earn your degree online from a respectable online college.
If you interested in an online bachelor’s degree, check out what the best online colleges offer, or search our online degrees for the exact program that interests you. In either case, you will find well respected colleges and universities that offer online degrees.
Back to TopMany 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.