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 18 schools in the Plains States 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 648 bachelor's degrees in drama & theater arts during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great Drama & Theater Arts School for Your Bachelor's Degree
The theater bachelor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. This section explores some of the factors we include in our ranking and how much they vary depending on the school you select. 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 take this into account we include a school's overall Best Colleges ranking which itself looks at a collection of various 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 drama & theater arts students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - The number of drama & theater arts 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 drama & theater 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 drama & theater arts related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for drama & theater arts students working on their bachelor's degree.
Since the program you select can have a significant impact on your future, we've developed a number of rankings, including this Best Drama & Theater Arts Bachelor's Degree Schools in the Plains States Region list, to help you choose the best school for you.
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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University of Iowa is a wonderful option for individuals pursuing a bachelor's degree in drama & theater arts. Located in the small city of Iowa City, Iowa is a public university with a fairly large student population.
Bachelor's students who receive their degree from the theater program earn about $22,225 in the first couple years of their career.
It's difficult to beat University of Minnesota - Twin Cities if you wish to pursue a bachelor's degree in drama & theater arts. UMN Twin Cities is a very large public university located in the city of Minneapolis.
Students who graduate with their bachelor's from the theater program report average early career income of $19,982.
It is difficult to beat Webster University if you want to pursue a bachelor's degree in drama & theater arts. Webster is a moderately-sized private not-for-profit university located in the suburb of Saint Louis.
After graduating, theater bachelor's recipients usually make an average of $13,182 in the first five years of their career.
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).
The theater bachelor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. This section explores some of the factors we include in our ranking and how much they vary depending on the school you select. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
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