Small colleges in New Jersey are a great option for students interested in a more intimate campus experience, more personal attention from excellent professors, and more immediate access to support services. Whether the focus is on the technical or on the liberal arts, small colleges give you the chance to pursue a well-rounded education while working closely with classmates and professors in a dynamic community atmosphere.
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.
The following list of the best small colleges and universities in New Jersey is composed mainly of four-year undergraduate schools (though a handful also offer graduate programs). We’ve identified 12 small colleges in New Jersey. To be included schools must fully accredited, and must have student body populations below 5,000 students.
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.
Tuition + fees
$33K
Acceptance
89%
Graduation
53%
Student body
4K
Fairleigh Dickinson University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$43K
Acceptance
73%
Graduation
69%
Student body
2K
Drew University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$36K
Acceptance
76%
Graduation
65%
Student body
4K
Median SAT/ACT
1115/22
Rider University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$28K
Graduation
48%
Student body
3K
Berkeley College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$39K
Acceptance
85%
Graduation
55%
Student body
3K
Median SAT/ACT
1015/20
Saint Peter's University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$7K
Student body
4K
Thomas Edison State University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$34K
Acceptance
81%
Graduation
57%
Student body
2K
Median SAT/ACT
1059/22
Georgian Court University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$36K
Acceptance
94%
Graduation
54%
Student body
2K
Median SAT/ACT
990/17
Felician University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$31K
Acceptance
85%
Graduation
33%
Student body
2K
Median SAT/ACT
965/17
Bloomfield College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$37K
Acceptance
92%
Graduation
64%
Student body
2K
Median SAT/ACT
1045/20
Caldwell University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$34K
Acceptance
93%
Graduation
62%
Student body
1K
Median SAT/ACT
1043/20
Centenary University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$35K
Acceptance
75%
Graduation
51%
Student body
1K
Median SAT/ACT
993/17
Saint Elizabeth University’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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