Best Community Colleges in New Jersey 2024

Published: Apr 19, 2022
Updated: Oct 16, 2023

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 New Jersey 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.

Rowan College of South Jersey 27 to 1
Rowan College at Burlington County 24 to 1
Hudson County Community College 24 to 1
Atlantic Cape Community College 23 to 1
Brookdale Community College 22 to 1
Essex County College 21 to 1
Middlesex College 21 to 1
Bergen Community College 20 to 1
Union College 20 to 1
Camden County College 20 to 1

Union College $10,562
Essex County College $7,742
Brookdale Community College $7,605
Passaic County Community College $7,260
Bergen Community College $7,224
Hudson County Community College $7,152
County College of Morris $7,008
Salem Community College $6,540
Atlantic Cape Community College $5,883
Ocean County College $5,790

Middlesex College
Union College
Warren County Community College
Sussex County Community College
Assumption College for Sisters
Passaic County Community College
Cumberland County College
Rowan College of South Jersey
Ocean County College
Rowan College at Burlington County

Assumption College for Sisters 5 to 1
Sussex County Community College 15 to 1
Salem Community College 15 to 1
Mercer County Community College 17 to 1
Warren County Community College 17 to 1
County College of Morris 17 to 1
Cumberland County College 17 to 1
Ocean County College 18 to 1
Passaic County Community College 19 to 1
Raritan Valley Community College 19 to 1

Camden County College $2,856
Rowan College at Burlington County $3,806
Cumberland County College $4,170
Rowan College of South Jersey $4,170
Mercer County Community College $4,728
Sussex County Community College $5,040
Warren County Community College $5,100
Middlesex College $5,664
Raritan Valley Community College $5,712
Assumption College for Sisters $5,773

Colleges and Universities in New Jersey

Nearly half of the colleges and universities in this state are private, and tuition rates range from $6,000 to $52,000. With a graduation rate of 97% and a student population of just over 7,000, Princeton University is the state’s most esteemed institution. Narrowing in on the sciences and arts, this Ivy League school offers unique areas of study, including robotics, intelligent systems, and public life. The remaining 31 public colleges and universities range in tuition from $4,000 to $17,000.

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The state’s largest and top-ranked public research institution is Rutgers University. With campuses in New Brunswick, Newark, and Camden as well as smaller locations across the state, Rutgers awards degrees in physics, economics, criminal justice, and psychology. New Jersey also has 11 religiously affiliated colleges and universities, including the oldest diocesan university in the United States, Seton Hall University. This Roman Catholic university has a tuition rate of $42,000 and a student population of over 8,000.

New Jersey, known for its sandy shores and busy expressways, also has more diners than any other state in the U.S., as well as the world’s longest boardwalk, located in Atlantic City. Many influential people, including Buzz Aldrin, Frank Sinatra, and Thomas Edison, have called The Garden State home. Visitors can even peek at some of Edison’s early light bulbs at the Menlo Park Museum. And with 50 higher learning institutions to choose from, students can find a school that suits their career path and budget.

Learn more about earning your degree from one of New Jersey’s highly regarded colleges and universities.

What are New Jersey’s Colleges & Universities?

New Jersey’s Best Overall

How do we determine New Jersey's best community colleges?

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 20 community colleges in New Jersey. The following list shows the best community colleges and primarily associate degree granting colleges in New Jersey.