Best Small Colleges in New York 2025

Badge for BEST IN NEW YORK SMALL COLLEGES

Published: Mar 22, 2021
Updated: Nov 13, 2024

Small colleges in New York 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.

Key Takeaways

New York’s small colleges offer a large range of degrees so that every student can find a topic of interest to study.
The best small colleges in New York offer students a more intimate campus experience, resulting in more personal attention from professors.
Small colleges in New York offer immediate access to support services for their students.

Table of Contents

2025 Ranking Update

Our Influence Ranking Engine™ leverages machine learning to track the real-world influence of colleges and universities over time. Below you’ll see which schools gained or lost ground for the 2025 school year.

The top 3 positions in our 2025 ranking of the best small colleges in New York remain unchanged from last year. Bard College moved up 1 position to number 4, while Sarah Lawrence gained 2 spots to move into the top 5.

Yeshiva University has launched over 25 cutting-edge graduate programs in fields such as Artificial Intelligence and Biotechnology. The school has also revamped its Career Center to integrate a vast network of active alumni and friends, creating exciting professional opportunities for students.

Bard College has introduced the BardBac program, which are full-tuition scholarships for adult students aged 24 or older pursuing a Bachelor of Arts degree.

Additionally, the Master of Arts in Global Studies program now features two distinct tracks: one in collaboration with Central European University in Vienna and another based entirely in New York City, providing students with flexible and globally oriented educational pathways.

Sarah Lawrence College has expanded its academic offerings, including new courses in the Theatre program such as “Directing in the Contemporary Theatre” and “Queering Stages With Trans and Non-Binary Pages,” reflecting a commitment to diverse and inclusive education.

Additionally, the Filmmaking and Moving Image Arts program now provides access to state-of-the-art facilities, including a 4K digital cinema projector and a 1,400-square-foot soundstage, enhancing hands-on learning experiences.

The following list of the best small colleges and universities in New York is composed mainly of four-year undergraduate schools (though a handful also offer graduate programs). We’ve identified 73 small colleges in New York. The list below of the 30 best small colleges in New York. To be included schools must fully accredited, and must have student body populations below 5,000 students.

How do we determine New York's best small 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.