Updated: August 1, 2017
Regional colleges can often fly under the radar when prospective undergraduates are looking for their ideal landing spot. Most college rankings tend to focus on nationally known universities, even though regional colleges offer similarly meaningful and substantive educations, but with benefits that make them far more appealing, academically and financially, for many students.
Regional colleges tend to focus more on undergraduate and master's programs, whereas national universities will also have students pursuing doctoral work. Their smaller scope helps to provide more individual attention to students and to emphasize the importance of local communities. Their strong connections with local businesses and residents help provide avenues for students to become interns and employees during their education, which allows them to hit the ground running the moment they graduate.
But despite this local focus, regional colleges have a large scope for students that wish to explore new areas of professional and academic life, and in the West there is a limitless expanse of space to grow and explore.
In fact, the close-knit community that grows out of each school creates a broader culture of camaraderie amongst Western regional schools. With national universities, students get in-state tuition only in their one, home state, but regional universities provide similarly reduced tuition for students of their entire, local area. For Western regional colleges specifically, the Western Undergraduate Exchange allows students from fifteen states throughout the West to receive a reduced tuition rate comparable to in-state tuition at public universities. And the Western Regional Graduate Program means that these benefits can extend through to graduate studies, for students who wish to pursue academia even further. Even private colleges, thanks to their small size, tend to have high grant and scholarship awards, which helps make many regional colleges highly affordable.
Regional colleges provide students with the strong support and attention that comes from a focus on local business and homegrown talent, but they also work together to ensure that students' options still give them the choices and the freedom to make their education unique and well-suited to their own, personal needs.
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What are the best regional colleges in the West?
College Choice uses a grouping of factors covering institutional excellence, student satisfaction, and return on investment to develop rankings. Institutional excellence looks at stats such as graduation rates, student-to-faculty ratios, and endowment sizes to judge each school's ability to follow through on providing an excellent education for each student. Student satisfaction measures how satisfied current and former students felt with the services and programs offered at each school. And finally return on investment looks at the financial benefits students are likely to receive from the school's education, weighed against the costs of attendance. In the end, we believe these 25 schools represent the best options of one of the best-kept secrets in the Wild West: regional colleges.
Rankings
See our rankings methodology page.
