Best Small Colleges in Wisconsin 2025

Badge for BEST IN WISCONSIN SMALL COLLEGES

By Dr. James Barham
Reviewed By Jenn Finley

Published: May 6, 2021
Updated: Oct 30, 2024

Key Takeaways

Wisconsin’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 Wisconsin offer students a more intimate campus experience, resulting in more personal attention from professors.
Small colleges in Wisconsin 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 4 schools in our 2025 ranking of the best small colleges in Wisconsin remain unchanged. Ripon College was our big mover in our ranking, jumping 6 spots to the number 6 position.

For the 2025 school year, Lawrence University is constructing a new building in partnership with the Trout Museum of Art. The building will feature interdisciplinary spaces for mathematics, computer science, and the humanities and will include innovative teaching spaces, a Humanities Center for collaborative learning, and soundproof studios for the Conservatory, fostering unique cross-disciplinary interactions.

Ripon College is renovating its Franzen Science Center, set to open in December 2024. The $35 million enhancement plan adds modern laboratories, collaborative spaces, and advanced STEM facilities designed to support innovative science education.

Small colleges in Wisconsin 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 following list of the best small colleges and universities in Wisconsin is composed mainly of four-year undergraduate schools (though a handful also offer graduate programs). We’ve identified 20 small colleges in Wisconsin. The list below of the best small colleges in Wisconsin. To be included schools must fully accredited, and must have student body populations below 5,000 students.

How do we determine Wisconsin'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.