Small colleges in Illinois 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.
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 following list of the best small colleges and universities in Illinois is composed mainly of four-year undergraduate schools (though a handful also offer graduate programs). We’ve identified 34 small colleges in Illinois. The list below of the 25 best small colleges in Illinois. 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
$50K
Acceptance
61%
Graduation
72%
Student body
5K
Median SAT/ACT
1295/29
Illinois Institute of Technology’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$41K
Acceptance
87%
Graduation
88%
Student body
3K
Median SAT/ACT
1330/29
Wheaton College ’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$52K
Acceptance
71%
Graduation
71%
Student body
1K
Median SAT/ACT
1220/27
Knox College ’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$51K
Acceptance
58%
Graduation
75%
Student body
2K
Lake Forest College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$12K
Acceptance
77%
Graduation
55%
Student body
3K
Median SAT/ACT
1107/22
University of Illinois Springfield’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$34K
Acceptance
61%
Graduation
46%
Student body
4K
Median SAT/ACT
1076/22
Benedictine University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$11K
Acceptance
46%
Graduation
16%
Student body
2K
Median SAT/ACT
951/17
Chicago State University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$42K
Acceptance
53%
Graduation
66%
Student body
3K
Median SAT/ACT
1145/24
North Central College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$33K
Acceptance
70%
Graduation
54%
Student body
2K
Median SAT/ACT
1063/23
McKendree University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$10K
Acceptance
48%
Graduation
24%
Student body
3K
Median SAT/ACT
935/19
Governors State University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$35K
Acceptance
79%
Graduation
56%
Student body
3K
Median SAT/ACT
1050/21
Saint Xavier University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$46K
Acceptance
57%
Graduation
77%
Student body
3K
Augustana College ’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$33K
Acceptance
86%
Graduation
53%
Student body
1K
Median SAT/ACT
1045/22
Trinity International University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$53K
Acceptance
57%
Graduation
82%
Student body
2K
Median SAT/ACT
1220/26
Illinois Wesleyan University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$28K
Acceptance
61%
Graduation
60%
Student body
<1K
Median SAT/ACT
1040/20
Eureka College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$40K
Acceptance
71%
Graduation
53%
Student body
2K
Median SAT/ACT
1075/23
Millikin University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$35K
Acceptance
75%
Graduation
68%
Student body
1K
Illinois College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$34K
Acceptance
51%
Graduation
46%
Student body
1K
Median SAT/ACT
1050/21
Rockford University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$37K
Acceptance
67%
Graduation
65%
Student body
4K
Median SAT/ACT
1070/22
Olivet Nazarene University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$41K
Acceptance
69%
Graduation
58%
Student body
<1K
Median SAT/ACT
1080/22
Monmouth College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$33K
Acceptance
44%
Graduation
59%
Student body
2K
Median SAT/ACT
1075/22
North Park University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$36K
Acceptance
76%
Graduation
63%
Student body
3K
Median SAT/ACT
1100/22
Dominican University ’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$31K
Acceptance
92%
Graduation
75%
Student body
<1K
Median SAT/ACT
1114/24
Principia College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$31K
Acceptance
67%
Graduation
50%
Student body
1K
Median SAT/ACT
1070/22
Quincy University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$33K
Acceptance
64%
Graduation
64%
Student body
1K
Median SAT/ACT
1060/23
Trinity Christian 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.