Here are the best colleges and universities in Utah. Our list will help you find the right kind of school for you.
Students hoping to earn their associate, bachelor’s, master’s, or doctoral degree in Utah can choose from among 18 different colleges and universities. Ten of these schools are private, including a fully online school — Western Governors University — which serves almost 80,000 students. Brigham Young University in Provo, one of Utah’s two religiously affiliated schools, has some of the state’s top programs in religious studies, history, and business.
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While tuition at private schools can be costly, fees at these two schools fall below the national average, ranging between $6,000 and $7,000. Utah’s public universities are also on the cost-friendly side. Utah Valley University, the state’s largest public school, serves over 28,000 students and has a sticker price of about $6,000. The University of Utah, another affordable option, is close behind, with a student population of just under 28,000 students. Here, students can earn degrees in fields such as computer science, chemistry, engineering, and anthropology.
If you’re someone who lives life to the extreme, Utah may be just the place for you. Careening down the hills at its world-class ski resorts, braving the rapids on white-water rafting trips, hiking through national parks, and speeding across mountain bike trails are just some of the ways visitors and residents of The Beehive State can get their thrills. Another selling point for Utah? Average tuition for this state’s colleges and universities falls thousands of dollars below the national average.
Learn more about Utah’s higher education opportunities by checking out the state’s many affordable colleges and universities.
Related: Differences between research universities and teaching colleges
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 13 colleges and universities in Utah that meet our criteria. This list of the top colleges in Utah below focuses on schools that offer bachelor’s degrees. The ranking features fully accredited public and private colleges and universities in Utah.
Tuition + fees
$9K
Acceptance
79%
Graduation
67%
Student body
28K
Median SAT/ACT
1261/25
University of Utah’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$6K
Acceptance
69%
Graduation
75%
Student body
35K
Median SAT/ACT
1315/28
Brigham Young University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$8K
Acceptance
91%
Graduation
50%
Student body
23K
Median SAT/ACT
1180/24
Utah State University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$6K
Graduation
36%
Student body
19K
Weber State University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$6K
Graduation
32%
Student body
29K
Utah Valley University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$7K
Acceptance
76%
Graduation
46%
Student body
9K
Median SAT/ACT
1130/23
Southern Utah University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$4K
Graduation
41%
Student body
4K
Snow College’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$6K
Graduation
35%
Student body
8K
Dixie State University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$7K
Graduation
47%
Student body
113K
Western Governors University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$17K
Graduation
33%
Student body
17K
Independence University’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$15K
Graduation
24%
Student body
<1K
Tuition + fees
$39K
Acceptance
87%
Graduation
69%
Student body
2K
Median SAT/ACT
1145/24
Westminster College ’s faculty and alumni have been influential in:
Tuition + fees
$17K
Graduation
53%
Student body
<1K
Provo 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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