If you pursue a bachelor's degree in design & applied arts, you won't be alone. The field of study is the #27 most popular program in the country. This makes choosing the right school a hard decision.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 23 schools in New York to determine which ones were the best for design & applied arts students pursuing a bachelor's degree. Combined, these schools handed out 2,669 bachelor's degrees in design & applied arts to qualified students.
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Choosing a Great Design & Applied Arts School for Your Bachelor's Degree
Your choice of design & applied arts for getting your bachelor's degree school matters. Important measures of a quality design program can vary widely even among the top schools. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
Quality Overall Is Important
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 include a school's overall Best Colleges ranking which itself looks at a host of various factors like degree completion, educational resources, student body caliber and post-graduation earnings for the school as a whole.
Average Earnings
To determine the overall quality of a graduate school, one factor we look at is the average early-career salary of those receiving their bachelor's degree from the school. This is because one of the main reasons people pursue their bachelor's degree is to enable themselves to find better-paying positions.
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 design & applied arts students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - How many other design & applied arts students want to attend this school to pursue a bachelor's degree.
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 design & applied arts 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 design & applied arts related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for design & applied arts students working on their bachelor's degree.
When choosing the right school for you, it's important to arm yourself with all the facts you can. To that end, we've created a number of major-specific rankings, including this Best Design & Applied Arts Bachelor's Degree Schools in New York list to help you make the college decision.
In addition to College Factual's rankings, you may want to take a look at College Combat, our unique tool that lets you pit your favorite schools head-to-head and compare how they rate on factors that most interest you.
When you have some time, check it out - you may want to bookmark the link so you don't forget it.
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Any student who is interested in a bachelor's degree in design & applied arts needs to check out Fashion Institute of Technology. FIT SUNY is a medium-sized public school located in the city of New York.
Bachelor's students who receive their degree from the design program make about $27,023 in their early career salary.
Syracuse University is one of the best schools in the country for getting a bachelor's degree in design & applied arts. Located in the medium-sized city of Syracuse, Syracuse is a private not-for-profit university with a fairly large student population.
Those design & applied arts students who get their bachelor's degree from Syracuse University make $16,043 more than the standard design grad.
Pratt Institute - Main is one of the best schools in the country for getting a bachelor's degree in design & applied arts. Pratt Institute is a medium-sized private not-for-profit school located in the large city of Brooklyn.
Bachelor's recipients from the design & applied arts degree program at Pratt Institute - Main get $5,902 more than the average graduate in this field when they enter the workforce.
It is difficult to beat The New School if you want to pursue a bachelor's degree in design & applied arts. Located in the large city of New York, New School University is a private not-for-profit school with a medium-sized student population.
Students who graduate with their bachelor's from the design program state that they receive average early career wages of $24,804.
Located in the large suburb of Rochester, RIT is a private not-for-profit school with a fairly large student population.
Those design & applied arts students who get their bachelor's degree from Rochester Institute of Technology receive $4,571 more than the standard design graduate.
Located in the small city of Troy, RPI is a private not-for-profit school with a medium-sized student population.
Bachelor's recipients from the design & applied arts degree program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute make $6,053 above the average college graduate with the same degree shortly after graduation.
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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.