Best Small Colleges in Maryland 2025

Badge for BEST IN MARYLAND SMALL COLLEGES

By Dr. James Barham
Reviewed By Jenn Finley

Updated: Oct 28, 2024

Key Takeaways

Maryland’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 Maryland offer students a more intimate campus experience, resulting in more personal attention from professors.
Small colleges in Maryland 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.

Goucher College moves up 2 positions to the number 1 spot in our 2025 ranking of the best small colleges in Maryland.

Goucher has expanded its academic offerings, introducing a three-year accelerated degree program for high-demand majors such as psychology, computer science, and data science, which allows students to earn their bachelor’s degree more quickly. The college also launched the Judy C. Lewent Science Innovation Center, enhancing research and educational opportunities in science and attracting both students and faculty interested in cutting-edge studies in fields like neuroscience and biochemistry.

Loyola University Maryland has expanded its STEM and health programs with a new Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN), supported by the ongoing expansion of the Donnelly Science Center. This $78 million renovation, anticipated to achieve LEED Gold certification, aligns with Loyola’s commitment to environmental sustainability, already recognized nationally for its green initiatives. Additionally, the “Together We Rise” strategic plan fosters a vibrant, inclusive campus culture with a focus on student success, social justice, and sustainability.

The following list of the best small colleges and universities in Maryland is composed mainly of four-year undergraduate schools (though a handful also offer graduate programs). We’ve identified 15 small colleges in Maryland. The list below of the best small colleges in Maryland. To be included schools must fully accredited, and must have student body populations below 5,000 students.

How do we determine Maryland'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.