Best Small Colleges in Indiana 2025

Badge for BEST IN INDIANA SMALL COLLEGES

By Dr. James Barham
Reviewed By Jenn Finley

Updated: Oct 9, 2024

Key Takeaways

Indiana’s small colleges offer a large range of degrees so that every student can find a topic of interest to study.
The best small colleges in Indiana offer students a more intimate campus experience, resulting in more personal attention from professors.
Small colleges in Indiana offer immediate access to support services for their students.

Table of Contents

2025 Ranking Update

Our Influence Ranking Engine™ leverages machine learning to track the real-world influence of colleges and universities over time. Below you’ll see which schools gained or lost ground for the 2025 school year.

Depauw University remains in the top position for our 2025 ranking of the best small colleges in Indiana. Earlham College and Wabash College move up into the number 2 and number 3 positions.

DePauw University has introduced several improvements for the 2025 school year that will appeal to students looking for a top small college experience in Indiana. Key among these is the launch of the new Creative School, which integrates arts, media, and design studies into a dedicated program, offering majors such as film and media arts, creative writing, and design studies. This complements the already established School of Business and Leadership, creating a robust three-school model that blends liberal arts with business and creativity.

Earlham College’s Epic Journey program offers students a fully funded career experience worth up to $5,000, including internships, research, and international opportunities, aligning with each student’s career goals. Furthermore, the Epic Advantage initiative enables 88% of students to engage in paid internships, which strengthens their post-graduate outcomes.

The following list of the best small colleges and universities in Indiana is composed mainly of four-year undergraduate schools (though a handful also offer graduate programs). We’ve identified 29 small colleges in Indiana. The list below of the best small colleges in Indiana. To be included schools must fully accredited, and must have student body populations below 5,000 students. To check out the full list of Indiana’s best colleges, including large and small institutions, check out our ranking.

How do we determine Indiana's best small colleges and universities?

Methodology

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.