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 Michigan 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.
With over 80 public and private colleges to choose from, students hoping to earn their associate, bachelor’s, master’s, or doctoral degree can find a program that suits their educational needs and budget. Michigan State University and the University of Michigan are the two largest schools, both serving around 42,000 students and costing $16,000 in tuition. Most of the schools in The Wolverine State, however, serve smaller student populations, with tuition fees ranging from $3,000 to $49,000.
Find college admissions consultants in your state.
Additionally, students pursuing their degree at a school with religious affiliations have more than 20 options to choose from, including Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit, Grand Rapid’s Calvin College, and Hope College in Holland. Students attending one of Michigan’s private schools, like Davenport University, can earn their degrees in fields like nursing, education, criminal justice, and history. Michigan, like many other states, also provides a special loan forgiveness program to those in medical, dental, and mental health professions who work in underserved communities. Recipients can receive up to $200,000 of tax-free funds over an eight-year period.
The great state of Michigan famously serves as the major hub of the United States auto industry — and also boasts the longest freshwater coastline in the nation. Students who love the outdoors but are also drawn to the metropolitan energy of big cities like Detroit and Grand Rapids will feel very much at home in Michigan.
To find your degree program, explore some of the top schools in Michigan.
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 23 community colleges in Michigan. The following list shows the best community colleges and primarily associate degree granting colleges in Michigan.
Tuition + fees
$6K
Graduation
12%
Student body
13K
Macomb Community College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$11K
Graduation
16%
Student body
3K
Muskegon Community College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$5K
Graduation
11%
Student body
5K
Mott Community College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$5K
Graduation
15%
Student body
10K
Oakland Community College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$4K
Graduation
27%
Student body
8K
Washtenaw Community College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$8K
Graduation
17%
Student body
8K
Grand Rapids Community College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$7K
Graduation
17%
Student body
8K
Lansing Community College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$7K
Graduation
16%
Student body
5K
Delta College ’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$7K
Graduation
24%
Student body
1K
North Central Michigan College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$3K
Graduation
14%
Student body
7K
Wayne County Community College District’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$7K
Graduation
30%
Student body
<1K
Gogebic Community College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$8K
Graduation
16%
Student body
3K
Mid Michigan Community College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$6K
Graduation
23%
Student body
<1K
Kirtland Community College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$6K
Graduation
21%
Student body
5K
Kalamazoo Valley Community College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$7K
Graduation
15%
Student body
3K
Kellogg Community College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$9K
Graduation
23%
Student body
2K
St. Clair County Community College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$6K
Graduation
22%
Student body
1K
Monroe County Community College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$7K
Graduation
29%
Student body
1K
Southwestern Michigan College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$9K
Graduation
34%
Student body
1K
Bay de Noc Community College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$3K
Graduation
14%
Student body
<1K
Bay Mills Community College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$8K
Graduation
34%
Student body
<1K
Montcalm Community College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$5K
Graduation
31%
Student body
<1K
Glen Oaks Community College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$4K
Graduation
26%
Student body
<1K
West Shore Community 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.