Barnard College

One of the country’s few remaining women's colleges, Barnard is a private liberal arts school that falls under the umbrella of Columbia University. Barnard offers its students access to stellar faculty, lots of encouragement and attention, and everything New York City has to offer.

The school is small. Campus covers just four square city blocks on Manhattan's Upper West Side and has just 3,200 undergraduate students. However, students can take advantage of all of Columbia's resources — including classes, libraries, dining halls, sports teams, sororities and student publications — without needing to follow Columbia’s rigid core curriculum. This mix of campuses is sometimes called “Barnumbia.”

Academics are rigorous at Barnard. It accepts just over 8% of applicants, but students receive plenty of support with a 10:1 student-to-faculty ratio. Undergrads are drawn to the school's strong academic departments, like the writing program that produced Edwidge Danticat, Zora Neale Hurston, Ntozake Shange, Jhumpa Lahiri and Patricia Highsmith.

Although the school has a high sticker price — Money estimates the net price of a degree (before factoring federal or state aid) to be over $300,000 — 88% of students graduate within four years, and a few years after leaving school, the median salary is over $70,000.

Overall, the students who choose Barnard tend to be deliberate about wanting the tight-knit community, smaller classes, access to professors and sense of history, pride and tradition their school provides.