Here are the best colleges and universities in Mississippi. Our list will help you find the right kind of school for you.
The majority of the learning institutes in Mississippi are public schools, with the University of Mississippi, also known as Ole Miss, being the largest. This university, located in Oxford, boasts alumni like William Faulkner, John Grisham, and James Meredith. Tuition at Ole Miss runs about $9,000, just below the national average. The eight private colleges, all of which have religious affiliations, range in tuition costs from $10,000 at Rust College to $40,000 at Millsaps College.
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Students who attend these schools have the option to pursue degrees in fields like nursing, business, dentistry, Christian ministry, education, and literature. Additionally, all of these private schools are considered small schools, serving under 5,000 students. Mississippi also offers up to $12,000 of undergraduate loan forgiveness, over the course of four years, for teachers who work in designated shortage areas or who teach in critical shortage subjects, like special education or mathematics.
From Mississippi mud pie to fried chicken, Mississippi brings a whole new meaning to the term comfort food.
The Magnolia State is easy on the eyes too. With nearly endless forests spilling over with hickory, pine, and oak trees, the intricate river system, and the Gulf Island National Seashore, Mississippi is a true destination for lovers of outdoor adventure. And students who plan on earning their associate, bachelor’s, master’s, or doctoral degree in Mississippi have 31 colleges and universities to choose from.
Explore some of the top schools and career paths Mississippi has to offer.
Related: Differences between research universities and teaching colleges
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 15 colleges and universities in Mississippi that meet our criteria. This list of the top colleges in Mississippi below focuses on schools that offer bachelor’s degrees. The ranking features fully accredited public and private colleges and universities in Mississippi.
Tuition + fees
$9K
Acceptance
88%
Graduation
67%
Student body
20K
Median SAT/ACT
1135/25
University of Mississippi’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$9K
Acceptance
80%
Graduation
64%
Student body
20K
Median SAT/ACT
1175/26
Mississippi State University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$9K
Acceptance
96%
Graduation
50%
Student body
13K
University of Southern Mississippi’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$8K
Acceptance
90%
Graduation
44%
Student body
6K
Median SAT/ACT
981/19
Jackson State University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$20K
Acceptance
29%
Graduation
65%
Student body
4K
Median SAT/ACT
1145/25
Mississippi College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$8K
Acceptance
100%
Graduation
39%
Student body
3K
Median SAT/ACT
1115/21
Delta State University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$43K
Acceptance
70%
Graduation
68%
Student body
<1K
Median SAT/ACT
1185/23
Millsaps College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$8K
Acceptance
99%
Graduation
46%
Student body
3K
Median SAT/ACT
1080/21
Mississippi University for Women’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$11K
Acceptance
71%
Graduation
40%
Student body
<1K
Median SAT/ACT
865/18
Tougaloo College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$8K
Acceptance
38%
Graduation
45%
Student body
3K
Median SAT/ACT
885/20
Alcorn State University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$14K
Acceptance
55%
Graduation
53%
Student body
4K
Median SAT/ACT
1065/24
William Carey University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$28K
Acceptance
50%
Graduation
47%
Student body
4K
Belhaven University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$10K
Acceptance
29%
Graduation
20%
Student body
<1K
Rust College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$7K
Acceptance
83%
Graduation
27%
Student body
2K
Mississippi Valley State University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$17K
Acceptance
99%
Graduation
51%
Student body
<1K
Median SAT/ACT
1105/20
Blue Mountain 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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