Fine Arts is above average in terms of popularity with it being the #125 most popular associate degree program in the country. So, you have a fair amount of options to choose from when looking for a school.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 9 schools in the United States to determine which ones were the best for fine arts students pursuing a associate degree. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 768 associate degrees in fine arts during the <nil> academic year.
DEBUG: Checking offer "Fine Arts (MFA) (I Have a Bachelors)" with relevance 1
DEBUG: ✓ Offer "Fine Arts (MFA) (I Have a Bachelors)" ACCEPTED (relevance 1)
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 1 offers with relevance >= 1.0
Choosing a Great Fine Arts School for Your Associate Degree
Your choice of fine arts for getting your associate degree school matters. Important measures of a quality fine arts program can vary widely even among the top schools. Below we explain some of the most important factors to consider before making your choice:
Overall Quality Is a Must
A school that excels in educating for a particular major and degree level must be a great school overall as well. To account for this 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.
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 fine arts students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - The number of fine arts students who choose to seek a associate 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.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized fine arts related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for fine arts students working on their associate degree.
Since the program you select can have a significant impact on your future, we've developed a number of rankings, including this Best Fine Arts Associate Degree Schools list, to help you choose the best school for you.
DEBUG: Raw major_slug = "visual-and-performing-arts//fine-and-studio-arts//fine-arts"
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).
by our College Data Analytics Team
Your choice of fine arts for getting your associate degree school matters. Important measures of a quality fine arts program can vary widely even among the top schools. Below we explain some of the most important factors to consider before making your choice:
