Small colleges in North Dakota 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.
The majority of the higher learning institutes in North Dakota are public schools and almost all of the schools could be considered small schools, serving less than 5,000 students. The state’s two largest schools, however, the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks and North Dakota State University in Fargo, each have a student population around 12,000 students. Tuition at both of these schools comes in just below the national average at $9,000.
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At UND and NDSU, students can study fields such as engineering, chemistry, law, and education. Additionally, students can attend one of the state’s five private schools, three of which have religious affiliations. Students who attend these schools can pursue degrees in fields like nursing, religious studies, education, and earth sciences. North Dakota also offers a private tribal college, United Tribes Technical College, located in the state’s capital, Bismarck, where students can expect to pay around $4,000 in tuition fees.
As the country’s number one producer of honey and sunflowers, and home to part of the international Peace Garden, North Dakota’s landscape is a thing of natural beauty. This magnificent state also has its fair share of one-of-a-kind attractions, including the Badlands Dinosaur Museum, which features world-class minerals and fossils, and the Turtle Mountain Chippewa Heritage Center, which gives an inside look at this Native American tribe’s unique culture and traditions. The state also boasts 19 colleges and universities for students hoping to earn a higher education degree.
Discover more about earning your degree in North Dakota by exploring some of the state’s top programs.
The following list of the best small colleges and universities in North Dakota is composed mainly of four-year undergraduate schools (though a handful also offer graduate programs). We’ve identified 7 small colleges in North Dakota. The list below of the best small colleges in North Dakota. 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
$8K
Acceptance
77%
Graduation
55%
Student body
2K
Median SAT/ACT
1025/20
Minot State University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$23K
Acceptance
72%
Graduation
55%
Student body
1K
Median SAT/ACT
1035/22
University of Jamestown’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$20K
Acceptance
72%
Graduation
59%
Student body
3K
Median SAT/ACT
1164/23
University of Mary’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$8K
Acceptance
99%
Graduation
36%
Student body
1K
Median SAT/ACT
1070/20
Dickinson State University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$8K
Acceptance
81%
Graduation
45%
Student body
1K
Median SAT/ACT
1019/21
Valley City State University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$5K
Graduation
48%
Student body
3K
Bismarck State College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$7K
Acceptance
53%
Graduation
31%
Student body
<1K
Median SAT/ACT
1065/20
Mayville State 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.