On Air Desgins

Most rankings of colleges and universities are top-heavy with schools from the East Coast (the Ivy League, MIT, etc.), California (Stanford, Cal Berkeley, etc.), and a few schools scattered throughout the rest of the country (University of Chicago, Vanderbilt, etc.).

In this ranking, we make geographical diversity our main focus, looking for the best education offered in each state, from Alabama to Wyoming.

Our criteria for putting a school on this list include the reputation of the school and its faculty, its dedication to a broad liberal arts education, its accreditation, and its overall academic caliber compared to other institutions of the same type within the same state.

Some states have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to institutions of higher learning (such as Massachusetts and California). In those cases, our job was not easy. Where two institutions were dominant—one primarily oriented towards the liberal arts and the other towards science and engineering—we went with the liberal arts school as offering a broader range of excellence across the curriculum (hence Harvard over MIT).

The result is a unique list of schools, two from each state, one a full-fledged research university, the other a college focused on undergraduate education. We believe this list identifies the very best that higher education has to offer across the length and breadth of this great land.

Note: For each state, we list the university first, and the liberal arts college second, regardless of alphabetical order. Also bear in mind that names can be misleading: Several of the institutions on our list that are essentially 4-year liberal arts colleges use the word “university” in their name. By the same token, one of our nation’s top research universities calls itself a “college” (see if you can spot it).

To jump directly to a given state, click on its abbreviation here: