The 25 Most Desirable Rural Schools

Calling the educational experience it offers “challenging and uplifting, enlightening and provocative, dynamic and focused,” Colby College is 13th on Newsweek’s list of most desirable rural schools and 23rd most desirable small school. The private liberal arts college in Waterville, Maine, strives to give its students “freedom to study, to think, to speak, and to learn in an environment that insists upon the free and open exchange of ideas and views.”

Colby students—93 percent of whom live on campus—engage in an active campus life with deep ties to the outlying community in Maine. And two-thirds of the school’s 1,800 students study abroad in the course of earning a four-year bachelors degree.

The school, founded in 1813, is one of the “little Ivies,” an informal collection of small schools whose academic rigor, selective acceptance policies and Northeastern locations parallel those of the Ivy League.  Less than a third of its applicants are accepted, and those who are average a 31 on the ACT and a 1430 on the SAT.