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 20 schools in Texas to determine which ones were the best for design & applied arts students pursuing a bachelor's degree. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 736 bachelor's degrees in design & applied arts during the 2022-2023 academic year.
Translate your creative ideas through concept, design and digital media with a bachelor's in graphic design online from Southern New Hampshire University.
Take the first step toward a career of visual expression and doing what you love with this online associate degree from Southern New Hampshire University.
Learn to create a striking portfolio and hone the skills you need to succeed in the world of professional photography with this online digital photography degree from Southern New Hampshire University.
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 quality education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To take this into account we include a college's overall Best Colleges ranking which itself looks at a combination 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 complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges 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 Texas 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.
DEBUG: Raw major_slug = "visual-and-performing-arts//design-and-applied-arts"
Translate your creative ideas through concept, design and digital media with a bachelor's in graphic design online from Southern New Hampshire University.
Learn to create a striking portfolio and hone the skills you need to succeed in the world of professional photography with this online digital photography degree from Southern New Hampshire University.
Get on the right path to the fast-paced, exciting world of video game art and design with this online bachelor's from Southern New Hampshire University.
The University of Texas at Austin is a good option for students pursuing a bachelor's degree in design & applied arts. UT Austin is a fairly large public university located in the city of Austin.
Those design & applied arts students who get their bachelor's degree from The University of Texas at Austin receive $10,713 more than the typical design graduate.
Texas State University is one of the finest schools in the country for getting a bachelor's degree in design & applied arts. Texas State is a fairly large public university located in the small city of San Marcos.
Design & Applied Arts bachelor's degree recipients from Texas State University get an earnings boost of about $10,603 over the typical earnings of design & applied arts graduates.
Located in the medium-sized city of Waco, Baylor is a private not-for-profit university with a fairly large student population.
Design & Applied Arts bachelor's degree recipients from Baylor University earn a boost of around $5,540 above the typical income of design & applied arts majors.
UH is a very large public university located in the large city of Houston.
Design & Applied Arts bachelor's degree recipients from University of Houston earn a boost of around $13,668 over the average income of design & applied arts graduates.
SHSU is a very large public university located in the town of Huntsville.
Those design & applied arts students who get their bachelor's degree from Sam Houston State University receive $6,166 more than the standard design graduate.
Gain a solid grounding in your online web design classes and exercise your creative muscle with this specialized online bachelor's from Southern New Hampshire University.
Go beyond traditional software development to gain the technical expertise required to succeed in an exciting and competitive field with this online bachelor's from Southern New Hampshire University.
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.
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:
