Top Oregon Colleges

For lovers of the Pacific Northwest, Oregon has some excellent choices for higher education. My top picks for the state range in size from small Reed College with under 1,500 students to Oregon State with close to 30,000. The list includes public and private institutions as well as several with religious affiliations. Our criteria for selecting Oregon's top colleges include retention rates, four- and six-year graduation rates, value, student engagement, and notable curricular strengths. We have listed the schools alphabetically rather than forcing them into any kind of artificial ranking; the differences between a large public university and a small liberal arts college are too great to make meaningful distinctions in rank.

All of the schools below have an admissions process that is at least partly holistic, so along with your grades and standardized test scores, less numerical measures can also play a role. Your personal essay, interview, and extracurricular involvement can help strengthen your application at many of these colleges and universities.