Northern Arizona University

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• Top 6 Colleges in Arizona

  Currently #3 · score 0

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• Arizona State University

  Arizona State University, founded in 1885, has grown into one of the largest public universities in the country by enrollment, and its designation by US News & World Report as the most innovative school in the country for multiple consecutive years reflects a deliberate institutional strategy built around access and scale rather than traditional selectivity. The university's W. P. Carey School of Business and its journalism school, the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, have each built strong national reputations, and ASU's fully online degree programs, offered at scale through partnerships including edX, have made it one of the leading providers of online public university education in the country. ASU's explicit institutional charter, adopted under longtime president Michael Crow, commits the university to being measured by "whom it includes" rather than "whom it excludes," a philosophy that's driven ASU's rapid enrollment growth and its self-positioning as a deliberately less selectivity-focused alternative to more traditionally exclusive research universities. The university's Tempe campus and its continued rapid growth in research funding, despite its size-focused rather than exclusivity-focused institutional philosophy, have made ASU one of the largest and fastest-growing major research universities in the country over the past two decades.

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• University of Arizona

  The University of Arizona, founded in 1885, is the state's original public research university, and its astronomy and planetary sciences programs are consistently ranked among the very best in the country, benefiting directly from Arizona's clear desert skies and the university's operation of several major research observatories across the state. The university's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory has played a direct role in numerous NASA missions, including leading the OSIRIS-REx mission that successfully returned a sample from the asteroid Bennu to Earth, giving the University of Arizona a level of direct institutional involvement in deep-space exploration matched by relatively few other universities. UA's optical sciences program is similarly among the best in the world, reflecting the same research strengths in astronomy and optics that have made Tucson, home to the university, one of the most significant centers for observatory and telescope technology development in the country. The university's combination of nationally leading space science research and its desert Tucson campus, offering unusually clear observational conditions for astronomical research, has made the University of Arizona one of the most significant academic centers for space and planetary science in the United States.

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• Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University

  Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, founded in 1925, is the largest university in the world exclusively dedicated to aviation and aerospace education, and its Prescott, Arizona campus, one of the university's two primary US locations alongside Daytona Beach, Florida, trains pilots, aerospace engineers, and air traffic controllers. The university's flight training program operates its own dedicated fleet of training aircraft, and Embry-Riddle graduates go on to become commercial airline pilots, military aviators, and aerospace engineers at rates that reflect the university's singular institutional focus on aviation and space-related careers. Embry-Riddle's aerospace engineering program benefits from close industry partnerships across the commercial aviation, defense, and growing commercial space sectors, giving students direct pipelines into major employers in fields directly tied to the university's specialized curriculum. The university's combination of hands-on flight training infrastructure and specialized aerospace engineering programs has made it the dominant standalone institution for aviation-focused higher education in the country, drawing students specifically committed to careers in flying or aerospace engineering rather than a broader liberal arts or general STEM education.

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• Grand Canyon University

  Grand Canyon University, founded in 1949 as a Southern Baptist-affiliated college, underwent a significant transformation beginning in 2004 when it transitioned to for-profit ownership before converting back to nonprofit status in 2018, a shift that came alongside dramatic enrollment growth into one of the largest Christian universities in the country. The university's nursing and healthcare programs have grown substantially alongside its broader enrollment expansion, and GCU's extensive online degree offerings, serving a considerably larger online student population than its Phoenix campus enrollment alone, reflect the university's broader growth strategy built around accessible, career-focused degree programs. GCU's Division I athletics program, including its men's and women's basketball teams competing in the WAC and other conferences, has grown alongside the university's broader institutional expansion, reflecting a deliberate strategy of raising the university's national visibility through athletics as its enrollment scaled up. The university's continued explicit Christian mission, combined with its unusual ownership history moving from nonprofit to for-profit and back, and its massive combined online and campus enrollment growth, have made GCU one of the most closely watched examples of rapid institutional transformation in American higher education over the past two decades.

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• Prescott College

  Prescott College, founded in 1966, built its academic identity around environmental studies and experiential, field-based learning from its founding, with students frequently completing coursework through extended wilderness expeditions and direct environmental fieldwork rather than exclusively traditional classroom instruction. The college's small size and its self-directed, competency-based academic model, in which students work closely with individual faculty advisers to design significant portions of their own course of study, give Prescott a distinctly alternative educational structure relative to more conventionally organized liberal arts colleges. Prescott's environmental studies, sustainable food systems, and outdoor education programs draw directly on the college's high-desert Arizona setting, and its adventure education program trains students for careers as wilderness guides and outdoor educators through direct field-based coursework. The college's alternative, self-directed academic model and its explicit environmental and sustainability focus have made Prescott a distinctive choice among students specifically seeking a nontraditional liberal arts education built around direct environmental engagement rather than a more conventional lecture-and-seminar curriculum.

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More in Colleges

• edX

  edX was founded in 2012 as a joint nonprofit venture between Harvard University and MIT, launched specifically to offer free access to real university-level courses from elite institutions, directly following the same MOOC wave that produced Coursera the same year. The platform's nonprofit, open-source origins distinguished it from venture-backed for-profit competitors, and edX's underlying Open edX software platform was made freely available for other institutions and organizations to build their own independent online course offerings. edX was acquired in 2021 by the for-profit online education company 2U for $800 million, a transaction that marked a significant shift for a platform that had spent its first decade explicitly organized as a nonprofit mission-driven initiative between two of the world's most prestigious universities. edX's combination of its founding as a nonprofit Harvard-MIT partnership and its later acquisition by a for-profit education company has made it one of the most institutionally significant online learning platforms in the MOOC movement's history.

• Udemy

  Udemy was founded in 2010, built around an open marketplace model letting virtually any individual instructor create and sell their own online course on any subject, a significantly more open and decentralized approach than platforms built around institutional university partnerships. The platform's marketplace structure, with instructors setting their own course content and often competing directly with other instructors teaching similar subjects, created an unusually large and varied course catalog spanning technical skills, business topics, and countless niche hobbyist subjects. Udemy's frequent deep-discount pricing promotions, regularly offering courses normally priced much higher for a small fraction of that cost, became a well-known and sometimes criticized part of the platform's sales strategy, reflecting the competitive economics of its open instructor marketplace. Udemy's combination of its open marketplace model for independent instructors and its massive, wide-ranging course catalog has made it one of the largest online learning platforms by total course volume in the industry.

• MasterClass

  MasterClass was founded in 2015 by David Rogier, built around a genuinely novel premise for online education: rather than academic instructors, the platform recruits world-renowned experts and celebrities, including chefs, athletes, and artists, to teach polished, cinematically produced courses in their specific fields of mastery. The platform's production values, using film-quality cinematography and editing rather than typical webcam-style online course recording, positioned MasterClass as much as premium entertainment content as traditional education, blurring the line between the two categories. MasterClass's roster of instructors, including figures like Gordon Ramsay teaching cooking and Serena Williams teaching tennis, relies heavily on the specific celebrity and expertise of each instructor as the platform's core value proposition, a different model than platforms built around institutional academic credibility. MasterClass's combination of its celebrity-instructor business model and its unusually high cinematic production values has made it one of the most distinctive online learning platforms in the industry.

• Duolingo

  Duolingo was founded in 2011 by Carnegie Mellon professor Luis von Ahn and his graduate student Severin Hacker, built around a free, gamified approach to language learning using short daily lessons, points, and streaks to encourage consistent practice habits. Von Ahn, who had previously co-created reCAPTCHA, brought a similar interest in crowdsourced technology to Duolingo's original business model, which for a time relied partly on having users translate real documents and web content as a byproduct of their language practice exercises. Duolingo's owl mascot, Duo, became known for its aggressively persistent notification style, reminding users to complete their daily lessons, a marketing approach that became a genuine internet meme and a widely recognized piece of the app's brand identity. Duolingo's combination of its gamified, streak-based approach to habit formation and its widely memed mascot-driven engagement strategy has made it one of the most downloaded and culturally recognized education apps ever created.

• Coursera

  Coursera was founded in 2012 by Stanford computer science professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, building on the massive open online course (MOOC) format that had generated significant attention after Stanford's own free online AI course drew over 100,000 enrolled students the previous year. The platform's partnership model, hosting courses created by actual professors from major universities including Stanford, Yale, and the University of Michigan, gave it a level of institutional academic credibility that distinguished it from platforms built around independent instructors. Coursera's evolution to offer full online degree programs and professional certificates from major employers including Google and IBM reflected a broader shift in how the platform positioned itself, moving from free enrichment courses toward credentialed programs with direct career and educational value. Coursera's combination of its origins in Stanford's pioneering MOOC experiments and its evolution into a platform offering full accredited degrees has made it one of the most academically significant online learning platforms in the industry.