Forbes’ Top 50 Small Private Colleges for 2027
It has been a hard few years for many small private liberal arts colleges. The enrollment cliff has arrived, the result of fewer live births in the U.S. after 2007. Small schools dependent on tuition have far less room than other schools, such as state flagships, to absorb a bad admissions cycle. Several small colleges have merged with larger institutions or closed; the pressure is greatest in the Northeast and Midwest, where small colleges are concentrated and high school graduating classes are already shrinking.
Yet many small colleges aren’t merely surviving—they’re outperforming most of American higher education. Those schools make up Forbes’ 2027 Top 50 Small Private Colleges list below. To compile it, we considered private nonprofit colleges with fewer than 4,000 undergraduates and applied the outcomes-based methodology used for our 2027 Top 500 Colleges ranking. It emphasizes graduation rates, alumni earnings, debt loads and leadership outcomes rather than reputation or selectivity.
Many of the schools at the top are extraordinarily selective, very wealthy or heavily oriented toward lucrative STEM fields—and sometimes all three. Their success says less about the health of small colleges generally than it does about how sharply the sector is dividing between institutions with money and market appeal and those without either.
Small colleges tend to focus on undergraduates, offering greater access to professors, more personalized coursework and close-knit campus communities, so their allure is easy to understand. At schools with strong science programs—like the California Institute of Technology (No. 1) or Harvey Mudd College (No. 17)—undergraduates may also have more opportunities to participate in research. Their scale can make advising and campus life easier to navigate, particularly for students who thrive in small classes where professors know their names. Bowdoin College (No. 3) gives faculty five meal tickets each semester to dine with students and reimburses professors for entertaining students outside of class.
Some of the most valuable features of a small college are also among the costliest to preserve. At Williams College (No. 2), Oxford-style tutorials place no more than 10 students in a course built around weekly meetings between a professor and pairs of students. At Pomona College (No. 4), more than 200 students received funding for summer research in 2025, most of it supported by more than $1 million in donations. Such programs give students unusually close mentorship and hands-on experience—but they depend on ample faculty time, donor support and institutional spending that can become difficult to sustain if finances tighten or other needs become more pressing.
Caltech, with fewer than 1,000 undergraduates, isn’t just our No. 1 small college. It ranks No. 7 among Forbes ’ Top 500 schools this year, ahead of research universities many times its size. Every school in the small-college top 10 also cracked the overall top 50. Small, in other words, can also mean mighty.
Applicants seem to have noticed. The 50 schools on this year’s list received 476,975 applications, up over 8% from the colleges on last year’s Forbes small-college list. Comparing only the 44 colleges that made both years’ lists, applications still rose 5%. Williams saw its applicant pool jump 34% in one year; Illinois Institute of Technology (No. 29) posted 37% growth in applications.
The surge isn’t universal. Applications fell nearly 9% at Swarthmore College (No. 11) and almost 12% at Hamilton College (No. 16). The Common App’s year-end data shows that member colleges with fewer than 2,500 students were roughly twice as likely as large universities to see a steep application decline—though paradoxically, they were also slightly more likely to post a big increase. In this market, being small cuts both ways. And because Common App users apply to an average of seven schools, a rising application count doesn’t necessarily mean more students are choosing small colleges—only that more are considering them.
The full cost of attendance at the top 10 on our list can run as high as $100,000 a year; small classes and close relationships are a hard sell at that price, particularly for families who earn too much to qualify for substantial need-based aid, but not enough to comfortably write a six-figure check. Michael Elliott, president of Amherst College (No. 5), makes the case: “It’s expensive because it is human centered, and because it is time intensive. We think of education as having a value that goes beyond simply the economic reward,” he says. “That said, we also know that there are economic opportunities that come from being able to think creatively, and we know that everybody is predicting that the job market is going to be changing dramatically. But I think if there were ever a moment to say you need to invest in preparing yourself for a lifetime of learning to learn, of being able to be flexible and thinking proactively rather than training for a specific profession or job, this is that moment.”
Elliott also notes that Amherst, like other wealthy small schools, offers need-based financial aid; the college pledges to meet 100% of students’ needs without loans, and the average student graduates with just $12,000 in debt. All 10 of the highest-ranked colleges on the list discount their published prices for students with financial need, but only two—Claremont McKenna (No. 6) and Washington and Lee (No. 8)—explicitly promote merit-based scholarships for incoming students.
Congressional Republicans and the Trump administration unexpectedly did some small colleges a favor. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act raised the top excise tax rate on the richest colleges’ endowment earnings to 8%, but also increased the enrollment threshold for the tax from 500 students to 3,000. That exempted about two dozen small, wealthy colleges that had previously paid it, Forbes reported —including Caltech, Williams, Amherst and Swarthmore. Larger schools, like Harvard and Yale, received a tax increase.
For a handful of small colleges not on our list, enrollment and financial pressures have proved fatal. Hampshire College will close permanently in December despite yearslong efforts by administrators and alumni, including filmmaker Ken Burns, to increase enrollment and refinance its debt. Sixteen nonprofit institutions closed in 2025, on top of the 16 that closed in 2024, according to Inside Higher Ed . The financial trouble extends well beyond the colleges that have already closed. Nearly half of the private, nonprofit institutions evaluated in Forbes ’ 2026 College Financial Grades earned a C or worse, including 27% that received a D.
Even well-known schools are making difficult choices. Barnard College (No. 22) posted operating deficits exceeding $20 million in fiscal 2023 and 2024, largely because it depends heavily on tuition, room and board. The deficit narrowed to $1.7 million in fiscal 2025 through new revenue and staff cuts, and the college says its finances are now stable. Selectivity and name recognition don’t provide immunity from running in the red.
Some colleges are responding by making the connection between a liberal arts education and a career more explicit. Brandeis University (No. 32) built a Center for Careers and Applied Liberal Arts that gives students an official “second transcript” —a record of internships, research and study abroad that helps students discuss their skills and experience with employers. Brandeis’ effort to “reinvent the liberal arts” includes a redesigned core curriculum featuring hands-on experiences, microcredentials, and a focus on career development and counseling from freshman year onward.
Sarah Lawrence College has a storied name as a women’s school (it went coed in 1968) but lacks the cushion of a large endowment—it ranks #424 on our list of Top 500 Colleges, missing the top 50 on this list. It is “tuition dependent, comparatively under-resourced,” says President Cristle Collins Judd. But like the other small-college administrators we spoke with, Judd argues that the breadth of its liberal arts education is itself a practical advantage. It “does, in this moment of disruption, serve a student in a very different way than a more narrow education that may get them their first job but doesn’t get them their last job, or their next job,” she says.
None of the colleges on this list are exempt from the pressures roiling higher education. But their outcomes—and the growing applicant interest in many of them—suggest the small college proposition still resonates. For families, the choice comes down to whether the advantages they offer suit a student’s needs and whether financial aid makes the price manageable. The challenge for these schools is to preserve the time and personal attention that make them distinctive—and prove that a small college can still deliver an outsized return.
