The 106 Smartest Liberal Arts Colleges In America

If you're looking for an intellectually stimulating environment and a tight-knit community, you may want to consider one of the following universities.

From our recent list of the smartest colleges in America, we pulled out the top liberal arts schools, as categorized by US News & World Report. These colleges emphasize undergraduate studies in the arts, humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences. Most are small, with class sizes typically under 20 students, which fuels learning and forges close relationships with peers and professors.

In order to determine a school's overall smarts, Jonathan Wai, a Duke University Talent Identification Program researcher, analyzed the average standardized test scores that schools report to US News. (Those that did not report scores are not included.)

These tests are often criticized, but research shows that both the SAT and ACT are good measures of general cognitive ability and give a reasonable snapshot of the brainpower level of that school.

ACT scores were translated into SAT scores (math + verbal) using this concordance table, so that all schools could be compared using one metric. Then, an average of the 25th and 75th percentile was computed (see a full description of the methodology and limitations here).

On the following ranking, a (2) next to the school's name indicates that some or all students aren't required to supply scores; a (3) indicates that the school did not supply all students it has scores for, or did not tell US News if it had; a (4) indicates that the data is from a previous year, rather than from the most recent year; and a (9) indicates that the school may not require scores from all applicants and that it may not have submitted data for all students.

Here are the smartest liberal arts colleges in America:

Note: The above schools are categorized as liberal arts colleges by US News & World Report.