Liberal arts colleges are a great option for students seeking a well-rounded education in an intimate campus setting. The best liberal arts colleges in Missouri offer a diverse selection of degree programs with opportunities for a highly individualized educational experience.
Tuition costs in Missouri fall below the national average, allowing students access to many affordable options. For example, at Missouri State University, the second largest public school, tuition fees are around $7,000. Students of actor John Goodman’s alma mater can major in fields like religious studies, history, and business, and even have the option of earning an associate degree in arts or a bachelor’s in business at the university’s sister school in China. Missouri also offers more than 40 private schools.
Find college admissions consultants in your state.
Tuition and student populations vary greatly among these schools, but students who attend these higher education institutes also have the option to attend classes at other campuses. For example, Saint Louis University, a college with Jesuit roots, has campuses in both St. Louis and Madrid, Spain. Additionally, Missouri offers special loan forgiveness programs for nurses and other health professionals, including dentists, psychiatrists, and primary care physicians, who work in designated, high-need areas.
When you aren’t exploring one of its 6,000 caves, chowing down on some barbecue, or taking in a live jazz performance, Missouri can serve as the perfect place to begin a road trip. The Show Me State is bordered by eight other U.S. states, making it ideal for students love travelling and planning weekend getaways. During the week days, students can continue on their road to success by pursuing their degree at one of Missouri’s 72 higher education institutes.
See where Missouri’s many roads can take you while earning your degree at one this state’s top learning institutions.
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.
A liberal arts college is a school that puts a premium on undergraduate studies and offers a broad range of subjects for students to study. A college of liberal arts typically provides smaller class sizes, more direct engagement with professors, and, most importantly, the opportunity to sample a wide range of subject areas on the way to a bachelor’s degree. We’ve identified Best Liberal Arts Colleges in Missouri 2022
Tuition + fees
$29K
Acceptance
53%
Graduation
55%
Student body
7K
Median SAT/ACT
1130/24
Webster University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$8K
Acceptance
72%
Graduation
75%
Student body
5K
Median SAT/ACT
1250/27
Truman State University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$9K
Acceptance
80%
Graduation
54%
Student body
6K
Median SAT/ACT
1119/22
Northwest Missouri State University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$8K
Acceptance
64%
Graduation
51%
Student body
9K
University of Central Missouri’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$19K
Acceptance
36%
Graduation
67%
Student body
<1K
Median SAT/ACT
1190/24
William Jewell College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$8K
Acceptance
93%
Graduation
51%
Student body
9K
Southeast Missouri State University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$26K
Acceptance
95%
Graduation
55%
Student body
2K
Evangel University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$40K
Acceptance
73%
Graduation
73%
Student body
3K
Median SAT/ACT
1169/24
Rockhurst University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$32K
Acceptance
71%
Graduation
60%
Student body
2K
Median SAT/ACT
1135/25
Drury University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$25K
Acceptance
64%
Graduation
59%
Student body
<1K
Median SAT/ACT
1120/22
Stephens College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$12K
Graduation
28%
Student body
8K
Park University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$26K
Acceptance
95%
Graduation
44%
Student body
1K
Median SAT/ACT
1015/22
Central Methodist University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$28K
Acceptance
85%
Graduation
66%
Student body
1K
Median SAT/ACT
1045/20
Fontbonne University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$7K
Graduation
36%
Student body
4K
Missouri Western State University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$7K
Acceptance
98%
Graduation
32%
Student body
4K
Median SAT/ACT
990/21
Missouri Southern State University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$26K
Acceptance
73%
Graduation
48%
Student body
2K
Median SAT/ACT
1027/22
Southwest Baptist University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$8K
Graduation
26%
Student body
2K
Lincoln University ’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$22K
Acceptance
42%
Graduation
51%
Student body
1K
Median SAT/ACT
1082/21
Avila University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$32K
Acceptance
97%
Graduation
60%
Student body
<1K
Median SAT/ACT
1110/22
Westminster College ’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$28K
Acceptance
98%
Graduation
46%
Student body
1K
Median SAT/ACT
995/20
Culver–Stockton College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$22K
Acceptance
62%
Graduation
23%
Student body
1K
Median SAT/ACT
965/18
Missouri Valley College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$24K
Graduation
28%
Student body
7K
Columbia College ’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$20K
Acceptance
14%
Graduation
60%
Student body
2K
Median SAT/ACT
1084/23
College of the Ozarks’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$31K
Acceptance
65%
Graduation
35%
Student body
3K
Median SAT/ACT
1010/21
Missouri Baptist University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$5K
Graduation
12%
Student body
1K
Harris–Stowe State University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$23K
Acceptance
61%
Graduation
54%
Student body
<1K
Median SAT/ACT
1075/21
Cottey College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$25K
Acceptance
65%
Graduation
43%
Student body
<1K
Median SAT/ACT
1020/21
Hannibal–LaGrange University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$16K
Graduation
66%
Student body
2K
Ranken Technical College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
In pursuing a bachelor’s degree, you will need to choose between three kinds of schools: research universities, liberal arts colleges, and online colleges.
Research universities are colleges and universities whose faculty are active in research and publishing. These schools offer a wide array of doctoral programs, especially in the sciences. They tend to be big, with tens of thousands of students.
Do you prefer a larger university setting, such as largest public university in your state? Research universities are typically big, offering degrees in many different disciplines. Is a big high-powered research environment the thing for you. If not, you should think about a liberal arts college. In deciding on an undergraduate institution, ask yourself what sort of environment will best help you to be happy and excel.
Often referred to as “teaching colleges” liberal arts colleges put a premium on undergraduate studies and offers a broad range of subjects for students to study. A college of liberal arts typically provides smaller class sizes, more direct engagement with professors, and, most importantly, the opportunity to sample a wide range of subject areas on the way to a bachelor’s degree.
Online colleges are typically the same colleges and universities you could attend in-person, but for certain degree programs the college or unviersity has made the degree programs available to be completed online. For over 5 million students, online degree programs allow students to earn their degrees in the most flexible format available. Online degrees are as respected as the on-campus degress you could earn from the same schools. There’s usually no disctinction between the two degrees, and your degree and transcript will not say that the degree was earned online. Online degree programs are offered by a vast majority of colleges and universities, and the number of offering continues to grow. Whehter you are searching for an associate, bachelor’s, master’s, or doctorate, there’s a good chance you can earn your degree online from a respectable online college.
If you interested in an online bachelor’s degree, check out what the best online colleges offer, or search our online degrees for the exact program that interests you. In either case, you will find well respected colleges and universities that offer online degrees.
Back to TopMany 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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