If you plan on getting your bachelor's degree in drama & theater arts, you won't be alone since the degree program is ranked #38 in the country in terms of popularity. As a result, there are many college that offer the degree, making your choice of school a hard one.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 16 schools in the Rocky Mountains Region to determine which ones were the best for drama & theater arts students pursuing a bachelor's degree. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 438 bachelor's degrees in drama & theater arts during the 2022-2023 academic year.
DEBUG: offers_url is valid, proceeding to fetch data
DEBUG: No offers_data.offers found, showing generic ESYOH widget
Choosing a Great Drama & Theater Arts School for Your Bachelor's Degree
Your choice of drama & theater arts for getting your bachelor's degree school matters. Important measures of a quality theater 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
A school that excels in educating for a particular major and degree level must be a great school overall as well. To make it into this list a school must rank well in our overall Best Colleges ranking. This ranking considered factors such as graduation rates, overall graduate earnings and other educational resources to identify great colleges and universities.
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
In addition to the above, you should consider some of the following factors:
Major Focus - How much a school focuses on drama & theater arts students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - How many other drama & theater arts students want to attend this school to pursue a bachelor's degree.
Educational Resources - The amount of money and other resources allocated to students while they are pursuing their degree. These resources include such things as number of students per instructor and education expenditures per student.
Student Debt - How easy is it for drama & theater arts to pay back their student loans after receiving their bachelor's degree.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized drama & theater arts related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for drama & theater 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 Drama & Theater Arts Bachelor's Degree Schools in the Rocky Mountains Region list to help you make the college 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.
DEBUG: Raw major_slug = "visual-and-performing-arts//drama-and-theater-arts"
Every student who is interested in a bachelor's degree in drama & theater arts has to take a look at University of Utah. U of U is a fairly large public university located in the city of Salt Lake City.
After graduation, theater bachelor's recipients usually earn an average of $20,701 at the beginning of their careers.
University of Colorado Boulder is a good decision for students pursuing a bachelor's degree in drama & theater arts. CU - Boulder is a very large public university located in the medium-sized city of Boulder.
Drama & Theater Arts bachelor's degree recipients from University of Colorado Boulder receive an earnings boost of approximately $8,288 above the typical income of drama & theater arts majors.
University of Northern Colorado is one of the finest schools in the United States for getting a bachelor's degree in drama & theater arts. Located in the medium-sized city of Greeley, University of Northern Colorado is a public university with a moderately-sized student population.
Bachelor's students who receive their degree from the theater program make an average of $24,761 in their early career salary.
It's difficult to beat Colorado State University - Fort Collins if you wish to pursue a bachelor's degree in drama & theater arts. Colorado State is a very large public university located in the midsize city of Fort Collins.
Bachelor's recipients from the drama & theater arts program at Colorado State University - Fort Collins get $4,318 more than the standard college grad with the same degree shortly after graduation.
UW is a fairly large public university located in the town of Laramie.
Bachelor's recipients from the drama & theater arts major at University of Wyoming make $2,199 above the typical college 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).