Fine & Studio Arts is above average in terms of popularity with it being the #58 most popular master's degree program in the country. As a result, there are many college that offer the degree, making your choice of school a hard one.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 5 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Fine & Studio Arts Master's Degree Schools in Illinois ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 285 master'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 Master's Degree
The fine arts master'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
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 for a Master's Degree 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 master's graduates during the early years of their career. That is, everyone wants their master'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 - The number of fine & studio arts students who choose to seek a master's degree at the school.
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 much debt fine & studio arts students go into to obtain their master'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 fine & studio arts related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for fine & studio arts students working on their master'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 Master's Degree Schools in Illinois.
DEBUG: Raw major_slug = "visual-and-performing-arts//fine-and-studio-arts"
Any student pursuing a degree in a master's degree in fine & studio arts needs to check out School of the Art Institute of Chicago. School of the Art Institute of Chicago is a small private not-for-profit school located in the city of Chicago.
Students who graduate with their master's from the fine arts program state that they receive average early career earnings of $24,521.
Any student pursuing a degree in a master's degree in fine & studio arts has to look into Eastern Illinois University. EIU is a medium-sized public university located in the remote town of Charleston.
Master's recipients from the fine & studio arts degree program at Eastern Illinois University earn $15,524 more than the typical college grad in this field shortly after graduation.
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).