List of colleges and universities in New Jersey

As of 2026^[update], the State of New Jersey recognizes and licenses 96 institutions of higher education (post-secondary) through its Commission on Higher Education. These institutions include eight public research universities, six state colleges and universities, fifteen private four year colleges, nineteen community colleges, thirty one religious institutions (as "Talmudic Institutions/Theological Seminaries"), and fourteen for-profit proprietary schools (as "Proprietary Institutions With Degree-Granting Authority"), two graduate schools, and one two-year religious college.^[1]

Old Queens, the oldest building at Rutgers University

Mead Hall at Drew University

Graduate College at Princeton University

As of February 2026, the United States Department of Education listed 156 New Jersey institutions in its database. This includes technical and vocational schools that offer only certificates or job training, as well as degree-granting colleges and universities.^[2]

New Jersey was the only British colony to permit the establishment of two colleges in the colonial period. Princeton University, chartered in 1746 as the College of New Jersey, and Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, chartered on November 10, 1766, as Queen's College, were two of nine colleges founded before the American Revolution.^{[3][4][5]: passim.} In the 1860s, these two colleges competed to become the state's land grant college under the terms of the Morrill Act of 1862 which provided land and funding to expand development of engineering, scientific, agricultural, and military education at one school in each state. Rutgers received the designation in 1864 began to expand instruction in these areas and taking on a hybrid private-public role that paved the way for its transformation into a state university in 1945. Today, Rutgers is a large public research university serving over 65,000 students. Princeton remained a private college and developed into a research university that is one of the nation's eight prestigious Ivy League schools.

On August 22, 2012, then New Jersey governor Chris Christie signed into law the New Jersey Medical and Health Science Education Restructuring Act which divided the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ) between Rutgers and Rowan University, creating two public medical schools.^[6][7] According to The Star-Ledger, the law gave Rutgers "nearly all of UMDNJ—including its medical schools in Newark and Piscataway—in one of the greatest expansions in the state university's history" and southern New Jersey's Rowan University would "take over UMDNJ's osteopathic medical school in Stratford."^[8]

There are three law schools in the state accredited by the American Bar Association; two at Rutgers (at the university's Rutgers–Newark and Rutgers–Camden campuses respectively) and the other at Seton Hall University's campus in Newark.^[9]