Best Small Colleges in Washington 2025

Badge for BEST IN WASHINGTON SMALL COLLEGES

By Dr. James Barham
Reviewed By Jenn Finley

Updated: Oct 28, 2024

Key Takeaways

Washington’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 Washington offer students a more intimate campus experience, resulting in more personal attention from professors.
Small colleges in Washington offer immediate access to support services for their students.

Table of Contents

10 Best Small Colleges in Washington 2025

Evergreen State College
+1
University of Puget Sound
+1
Whitman College
–2
Seattle Pacific University
Pacific Lutheran University
Walla Walla University
+2
Whitworth University
+2
City University of Seattle
–1
DigiPen Institute of Technology
–3
Saint Martin's University

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.

Evergreen State College and the University of Puget Sound moves into the number 1 position in our 2025 ranking of the best small colleges in Washington.

The Evergreen State College has added men’s and women’s wrestling and cross-country teams, making it the only four-year college in Washington with an intercollegiate wrestling program. Additionally, Evergreen has committed to fostering a more inclusive environment, with a 6% increase in Latinx and Native American/Alaska Native students and a 30% intake of first-generation college students in the new class.

The University of Puget Sound has revamped its dining services, now offering expanded plant-based and diverse culinary options, including boba tea and international cuisine to cater to a wide range of dietary preferences and tastes. In addition, Puget Sound has upgraded campus security with a new contactless access control system, enhancing convenience and safety for students.

The following list of the best small colleges and universities in Washington is composed mainly of four-year undergraduate schools (though a handful also offer graduate programs). We’ve identified 27 small colleges in Washington. The list below of the 30 best small colleges in Washington. To be included schools must fully accredited, and must have student body populations below 5,000 students.

How do we determine Washington'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.