Best Colleges in Mississippi 2024

Badge for BEST IN MISSISSIPPI COLLEGES & UNIVERSITIES

By Dr. James Barham

Published: Apr 13, 2021
Updated: Jul 24, 2024

Best Colleges and Universities in Mississippi

University of Mississippi

Student to Faculty Ratio: 16:1

Mississippi State University

Student to Faculty Ratio: 16:1

Jackson State University

Student to Faculty Ratio: 15:1

University of Southern Mississippi

Student to Faculty Ratio: 15:1

Tougaloo College

Student to Faculty Ratio: 9:1

Alcorn State University

Student to Faculty Ratio: 16:1

Mississippi College

Student to Faculty Ratio: 13:1

Millsaps College

Student to Faculty Ratio: 9:1

Mississippi University for Women

Student to Faculty Ratio: 11:1

Delta State University

Student to Faculty Ratio: 10:1

Key Takeaways

Fifteen schools in Mississippi meet our criteria for the best colleges and universities in the state.
Students attending one of the top Mississippi colleges will be taught by some of the most influential professors in the world.
Pursuing a degree at a public university in Mississippi is one of the most affordable options for a higher education in the state.

Table of Contents

Colleges and Universities in Mississippi

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.

What are Mississippi’s Colleges & Universities?

Mississippi’s Best Overall

How do we determine Mississippi's best 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.

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.