Small colleges in Florida 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.
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.
The following list of the best small colleges and universities in Florida is composed mainly of four-year undergraduate schools (though a handful also offer graduate programs). We’ve identified a total of 32 small colleges in Florida. The list below of the 25 best small colleges in Flordia. 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
$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
$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
$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
$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
$34K
Acceptance
92%
Graduation
57%
Student body
3K
Median SAT/ACT
1090/23
Palm Beach Atlantic University’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
$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:
Tuition + fees
$15K
Acceptance
98%
Graduation
33%
Student body
3K
Median SAT/ACT
925/16
Bethune–Cookman University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$21K
Acceptance
56%
Graduation
58%
Student body
3K
Flagler College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$3K
Graduation
33%
Student body
4K
Northwest Florida State College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$18K
Acceptance
76%
Graduation
54%
Student body
<1K
Median SAT/ACT
1095/23
Florida College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$14K
Acceptance
89%
Graduation
28%
Student body
<1K
City College ’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$19K
Acceptance
75%
Graduation
58%
Student body
2K
Everglades University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$2K
Graduation
40%
Student body
3K
Gulf Coast State College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$13K
Acceptance
67%
Graduation
32%
Student body
<1K
Median SAT/ACT
975/19
Trinity Baptist College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$45K
Acceptance
45%
Graduation
62%
Student body
<1K
Beacon College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$3K
Graduation
59%
Student body
2K
South Florida State College’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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