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 Texas 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.
Texas offers more than 30 colleges and universities that serve communities of 10,000 students or more. The largest school in the bunch (and in the nation), Texas A&M University in College Station serves more than 65,000 students. The University of Texas at Austin is the next largest, serving about 45,000 students — but it too has a big claim to fame, as the wealthiest public university in the United States. Texas’s private colleges and universities, including Baylor University and Southern Methodist University, are also impressive in size and scope. The majority of these schools have religious affiliations and offer degrees in a variety fields, such as nursing, religious studies, criminal justice, business, and education.
Find college admissions consultants in your state.
For students who prefer a more intimate educational environment, Texas offers a long list of smaller public and private colleges and universities, such as Abilene Christian University and University of Texas of the Permian Basin. Additionally, Texas has generous loan forgiveness programs for qualifying nurses, physicians, teachers, legal aid attorneys, and lawyers who work in the Texas Attorney General’s office.
Texas is known for doing things big. Big cities, big open spaces and, of course, big fun. Whether you’re hitting up the live music scene in Austin, catching a Cowboys game in Dallas, or strolling down the River Walk in San Antonio, you’re sure to have a good time. And, with more than 150 higher education institutes, it’s safe to say The Lone Star State is big on education too.
If you’re looking to earn your degree in the state of Texas, you’ll have plenty of higher learning institutes to choose from.
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 53 community colleges in Texas. The following list shows the best community colleges and primarily associate degree granting colleges in Texas.
Tuition + fees
$5K
Graduation
12%
Student body
49K
Lone Star College System’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$3K
Graduation
16%
Student body
22K
Collin College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$6K
Graduation
9%
Student body
15K
Blinn College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$3K
Graduation
27%
Student body
14K
San Jacinto College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$7K
Graduation
22%
Student body
11K
San Antonio College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$5K
Graduation
20%
Student body
5K
Weatherford College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$4K
Graduation
25%
Student body
3K
Angelina College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$4K
Graduation
48%
Student body
5K
Lee College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$4K
Graduation
32%
Student body
4K
Kilgore College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$4K
Graduation
17%
Student body
34K
Houston Community College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$3K
Graduation
30%
Student body
4K
Alvin Community College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$3K
Graduation
28%
Student body
3K
College of the Mainland’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$3K
Graduation
21%
Student body
33K
Tarrant County College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$4K
Graduation
15%
Student body
9K
Central Texas College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$4K
Graduation
18%
Student body
5K
Wharton County Junior College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$3K
Graduation
32%
Student body
6K
Amarillo College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$3K
Graduation
25%
Student body
2K
Galveston College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$4K
Graduation
19%
Student body
2K
Victoria College ’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$5K
Graduation
13%
Student body
5K
Del Mar College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$5K
Graduation
32%
Student body
2K
Ranger College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$4K
Graduation
37%
Student body
3K
Paris Junior College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$5K
Graduation
15%
Student body
3K
Temple College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$3K
Graduation
23%
Student body
17K
El Paso Community College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$4K
Graduation
18%
Student body
6K
McLennan Community College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$5K
Graduation
20%
Student body
6K
North Central Texas College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$4K
Graduation
51%
Student body
1K
Western Texas College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$11K
Graduation
12%
Student body
25K
Austin Community College District’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$4K
Graduation
25%
Student body
4K
Odessa College’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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