The best community colleges provide an effective springboard into higher education, offering students high-quality two-year degree programs in a wide range of disciplines. The top-rated community colleges in Illinois offer a broad selection of associate’s degrees, affordable tuition rates, and strong partnerships with public four-year schools so that students can easily transfer their credits into accredited bachelor’s degree programs.
Illinois offers over 130 higher education institutes throughout the state. More than half of those schools are private, including the well-known DePaul University, Northwestern University, and Loyola University Chicago. While tuition at these three private schools can be costly, ranging from $44,000 to $55,000, graduation rates are high. Tuition at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Illinois at Chicago, the state’s two largest public universities, falls in the range of $13,000 to $15,000.
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While some of these universities have large student populations, Illinois is also home to many small schools, including Benedictine University and National Louis University. Students choosing to study at one at an Illinois college can pursue degrees in areas like criminal justice, social work, nursing, education, religious studies, communications, and medicine. Additionally, Illinois offers several loan forgiveness program for qualifying students pursuing careers as teachers, public defenders or prosecutors, or nurses.
From the skyscrapers in Chicago to the vast prairie lands in the north, Illinois is a place where city meets country. Students can grab a Chicago-style hotdog on the way to a Cubs game, explore the ancient sandstone cliffs in the Shawnee National Forest, or admire an exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago, all while attending one of The Prairie State’s universities or colleges.
The higher education institutes in Illinois have also produced many prominent alumni, including Stephen Colbert, Hugh Hefner, and Kurt Vonnegut. Students hoping to walk the same streets as these well-known individuals can check out some of the state’s top programs and universities.
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.
We’ve identified 49 community colleges in Illinois. The following list shows the best community colleges and primarily associate degree granting colleges in Illinois.
Tuition + fees
$10K
Graduation
22%
Student body
15K
College of DuPage’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$12K
Graduation
23%
Student body
5K
Malcolm X College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$4K
Graduation
18%
Student body
9K
Joliet Junior College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$12K
Graduation
31%
Student body
5K
Parkland College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$10K
Graduation
28%
Student body
6K
Oakton Community College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$12K
Graduation
25%
Student body
7K
Wilbur Wright College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$10K
Graduation
35%
Student body
9K
Harper College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$12K
Graduation
21%
Student body
5K
Harold Washington College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$11K
Graduation
22%
Student body
6K
Triton College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$7K
Graduation
42%
Student body
7K
Elgin Community College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$8K
Graduation
29%
Student body
9K
Moraine Valley Community College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$12K
Graduation
28%
Student body
5K
Truman College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$17K
Graduation
61%
Student body
<1K
Coyne College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$10K
Graduation
42%
Student body
3K
Heartland Community College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$12K
Graduation
24%
Student body
2K
Olive–Harvey College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$9K
Graduation
17%
Student body
3K
Prairie State College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$10K
Graduation
32%
Student body
9K
College of Lake County’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$6K
Graduation
28%
Student body
6K
Southwestern Illinois College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$10K
Graduation
51%
Student body
3K
Lewis and Clark Community College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$9K
Graduation
34%
Student body
6K
Waubonsee Community College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$12K
Graduation
32%
Student body
4K
McHenry County College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$7K
Graduation
38%
Student body
4K
Lincoln Land Community College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$11K
Graduation
18%
Student body
3K
South Suburban College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$9K
Graduation
39%
Student body
5K
Illinois Central College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$12K
Graduation
28%
Student body
2K
Kennedy–King 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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