University of Wisconsin-Madison

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• Top 6 Colleges in Wisconsin

  Currently #1 · score 0

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• Marquette University

  Marquette University, founded in 1881 by the Jesuit order, is the largest private university in Wisconsin, and its downtown Milwaukee campus gives students direct access to the city's business, legal, and healthcare industries in a way few other regional Catholic universities can match. The university's law school and its college of business administration have each built strong regional reputations, and Marquette's nursing and healthcare programs benefit from close clinical partnerships with Milwaukee's major hospital systems, reflecting the school's broader emphasis on professional programs tied directly to the surrounding urban economy. Marquette's men's basketball program, including a 1977 national championship under legendary coach Al McGuire, has given the university a national athletic profile, and the school's rivalry with in-state public flagship University of Wisconsin-Madison, though the two rarely play each other in football, remains a significant storyline in Wisconsin college sports more broadly. The university's Jesuit mission, emphasizing service and ethical leadership alongside rigorous academics, combined with its urban Milwaukee setting and increasingly strong professional programs, has made Marquette a consistent draw for students seeking a private Catholic education without leaving Wisconsin's largest metropolitan area.

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• Beloit College

  Beloit College, founded in 1846, is one of the oldest liberal arts colleges in the Midwest, and its anthropology and archaeology programs have built a particularly strong national reputation, supported by the college's own on-campus Logan Museum of Anthropology, one of relatively few dedicated anthropology museums at an undergraduate liberal arts college. The college's small size, around 1,000 undergraduates, and its location in Beloit, a small city straddling the Wisconsin-Illinois border, give it an intimate, close-knit campus culture distinct from the larger public universities elsewhere in the state. Beloit's international studies and world affairs programs have drawn a consistently high proportion of international students relative to the college's size, and the school's "Liberal Arts in Practice" curriculum requirement, mandating a career-connected experiential component for every student, reflects a deliberate institutional effort to tie liberal arts study directly to post-graduation outcomes. The college's Mindset List, an annual publication describing the cultural touchstones and worldview of each incoming first-year class, became a widely cited media reference point well beyond the college itself, giving small Beloit a level of broader public name recognition unusual for a liberal arts college of its size.

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• Lawrence University

  Lawrence University, founded in 1847, combines a traditional liberal arts college with the Lawrence Conservatory of Music, one of the relatively few standalone music conservatories fully integrated within a liberal arts institution, letting students pursue a full liberal arts degree alongside rigorous conservatory-level musical training. The university's small size, around 1,500 undergraduates, and its riverside campus along the Fox River in Appleton, Wisconsin, give Lawrence an intimate residential college feel distinct from larger Midwestern research universities. Lawrence's tutorial and independent study opportunities, along with its relatively unusual "Freshman Studies" required seminar spanning both semesters of a student's first year, reflect the university's emphasis on close faculty engagement and interdisciplinary intellectual grounding from the very start of a student's academic career. The combination of Lawrence's genuine conservatory-level music training and its broader liberal arts curriculum has made it a distinctive choice among students specifically seeking that dual academic and musical track, occupying a similar niche in the Midwest that Oberlin College's conservatory holds in Ohio.

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• Ripon College

  Ripon College, founded in 1851, is widely credited as one of the founding sites of the Republican Party, with an 1854 meeting held in Ripon's Little White Schoolhouse considered by many historians to be the party's first organizational gathering, a piece of American political history the small college actively preserves and promotes. The college's small size, fewer than 900 undergraduates, and its rural central Wisconsin location give Ripon an intimate, close-knit campus culture, and its "Ripon Plan" curriculum emphasizes small, discussion-based classes with a low student-faculty ratio throughout a student's four years. Ripon's education and pre-law programs have built solid regional reputations, and the college's relatively accessible admissions profile compared to some of Wisconsin's more selective private colleges has made it a consistent choice for students seeking a small liberal arts experience without the extreme selectivity of peer institutions. The college's historical claim to the Republican Party's founding gives it a level of niche national recognition disproportionate to its small size, and Ripon continues to host events and maintain archives connected to that history as part of its institutional identity.

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• St. Norbert College

  St. Norbert College, founded in 1898, is the only Norbertine-affiliated college in the United States, a Catholic religious order whose members remain directly involved in the college's governance and campus religious life in a way distinct from the more common Jesuit or diocesan Catholic university models found elsewhere. The college's location in De Pere, adjacent to Green Bay, gives St. Norbert a close, longstanding relationship with the Green Bay Packers, who have held their annual summer training camp on the college's campus since 1958, one of the longest continuous NFL training camp partnerships with any American college. St. Norbert's business and education programs have built solid regional reputations, and the college's small size, around 2,000 undergraduates, lets it maintain close faculty engagement typical of small liberal arts colleges while offering professional program options less common at similarly sized institutions. The college's decades-long Packers training camp partnership has given St. Norbert a level of regional visibility and community integration unusual for a small Catholic liberal arts college, tying the school's public identity directly to one of the NFL's most historically significant franchises.

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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.