Fine & Studio Arts is of the hottest bachelor's degree programs in the United States, coming in as the #22 most popular major in the country. This means there are lots of options to choose from when you decide to get your degree.
College Factual looked at 40 colleges and universities when compiling its 2025 Best Fine & Studio Arts Bachelor's Degree Schools in California ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 3,997 bachelor's degrees in fine & studio arts during the 2022-2023 academic year.
DEBUG: Checking offer "Fine Arts (MFA) (I Have a Bachelors)" with relevance 0.8
DEBUG: ✓ Offer "Fine Arts (MFA) (I Have a Bachelors)" ACCEPTED (relevance 0.8)
DEBUG: relevant_offers count = 1
DEBUG: relevant_offers > 0, checking for ESYOH offers
DEBUG: ESYOH filtering - found 1 ESYOH offers with relevance >= 0.8
DEBUG: esyoh_offers count = 1
DEBUG: ESYOH offers found, rendering ESYOH widget
DEBUG: most_relevant_only = true, filtering for most relevant
DEBUG: Found 0 offers with relevance >= 1.0
DEBUG: Backfilling with 0 offers with relevance >= 0.9
DEBUG: Backfilling with 1 offers with relevance >= 0.8
Choosing a Great Fine & Studio Arts School for Your Bachelor's Degree
Your choice of fine & studio arts for getting your bachelor's degree school matters. 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
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 fine & studio arts students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - How many other fine & studio 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 fine & studio 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 fine & studio arts related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for fine & studio arts students working on their bachelor's degree.
The fine arts school you choose to invest your time and money in matters. To help you make the decision that is right for you, we've developed a number of major-specific rankings, including this list of the Best Fine & Studio Arts Bachelor's Degree Schools in California.
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//fine-and-studio-arts"
University of Southern California is one of the best schools in the United States for getting a bachelor's degree in fine & studio arts. USC is a fairly large private not-for-profit university located in the city of Los Angeles.
Fine & Studio Arts bachelor's degree recipients from University of Southern California receive an earnings boost of approximately $27,218 over the typical earnings of fine & studio arts graduates.
Any student who is interested in a bachelor's degree in fine & studio arts needs to check out University of California - Los Angeles. Located in the large city of Los Angeles, UCLA is a public university with a fairly large student population.
Students who graduate with their bachelor's from the fine arts program state that they receive average early career income of $21,220.
It is hard to beat University of California - Berkeley if you wish to pursue a bachelor's degree in fine & studio arts. UC Berkeley is a fairly large public university located in the city of Berkeley.
Bachelor's students who receive their degree from the fine arts program earn around $20,368 for their early 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).