a bachelor's degree in dance is more popular than many other degrees. In fact, it ranks #115 out of 363 on popularity of all such degrees in the nation. As a result, there are many college that offer the degree, making your choice of school a hard one.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 12 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Dance Bachelor's Degree Schools in the Far Western US Region ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 384 bachelor's degrees in dance during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great Dance School for Your Bachelor's Degree
The dance bachelor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality dance program can vary widely even among the top schools. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
A Great Overall School
The overall quality of a bachelor's degree school is important to ensure a good education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To account for this we consider a school's overall Best Colleges ranking which itself looks at a host of different factors like degree completion, educational resources, student body caliber and post-graduation earnings for the school as a whole.
Early-Career Earnings
One measure we use to determine the quality of a school is to look at the average salary of bachelor's graduates during the early years of their career. That is, everyone wants their bachelor's degree to be worth something, and salaries are one measure of determining that.
Other Factors We Consider
The metrics below are just some of the other metrics that we use to determine our rankings.
Major Focus - How many resources a school devotes to dance students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - The number of dance students who choose to seek a bachelor's degree at the school.
Educational Resources - How many resources are allocated to students. These resources may include educational expenditures per student, number of students per instructor, and graduation rate among other things.
Student Debt - How much debt dance students go into to obtain their bachelor's degree and how well they are able to pay back that debt.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized dance related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for dance students working on their bachelor's degree.
Since picking the right college can be one of the most important decisions of your life, we've developed the Best Dance Bachelor's Degree Schools in the Far Western US Region ranking, along with many other major-related rankings, to help you make that decision.
In addition to our rankings, you can take two colleges and compare them based on the criteria that matters most to you in our unique tool, College Combat.
Test it out when you get a chance! You may also want to bookmark the link and share it with others who are trying to make the college decision.
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Every student pursuing a degree in a bachelor's degree in dance has to look into University of California - Irvine. Located in the city of Irvine, UC Irvine is a public university with a fairly large student population.
Dance bachelor's degree recipients from University of California - Irvine get an earnings boost of about $4,070 over the average income of dance majors.
It is difficult to beat University of California - Los Angeles if you want to pursue a bachelor's degree in dance. UCLA is a very large public university located in the city of Los Angeles.
Students who graduate with their bachelor's from the dance program state that they receive average early career income of $19,787.
Every student pursuing a degree in a bachelor's degree in dance has to take a look at University of Southern California. Located in the city of Los Angeles, USC is a private not-for-profit university with a fairly large student population.
Bachelor's graduates who receive their degree from the dance program earn an average of $25,653 in their early career salary.
Located in the city of Long Beach, CSULB is a public university with a very large student population.
Bachelor's recipients from the dance major at California State University - Long Beach earn $6,644 more than the average graduate with the same degree when they enter the workforce.
The bars on the spread charts above show the distribution of the schools on this list +/- one standard deviation from the mean.
The Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), a branch of the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) serves as the core of the rest of our data about colleges.
Some other college data, including much of the graduate earnings data, comes from the U.S. Department of Education’s (College Scorecard).