If you plan on getting your master's degree in fine & studio arts, you won't be alone since the degree program is ranked #58 in the country in terms of popularity. This means you won't have too much trouble finding schools that offer the degree.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 11 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Fine & Studio Arts Master's Degree Schools in the Great Lakes Region ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 490 master's degrees in fine & studio arts during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great Fine & Studio Arts School for Your Master's Degree
Your choice of fine & studio arts for getting your master's degree school matters. Important measures of a quality fine arts program can vary widely even among the top schools. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
Quality Overall Is Important
The overall quality of a master'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 consider a school's overall Best Colleges for a Master's Degree 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.
Average Earnings
To determine the overall quality of a graduate school, one factor we look at is the average early-career salary of those receiving their master's degree from the school. This is because one of the main reasons people pursue their master's degree is to enable themselves to find better-paying positions.
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 & studio arts students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - How many other fine & studio arts students want to attend this school to pursue a master's degree.
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 easy is it for fine & studio arts to pay back their student loans after receiving their master'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 schools for fine & studio arts students working on their master'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 Fine & Studio Arts Master's Degree Schools in the Great Lakes Region list, to help you choose the best school for you.
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University of Wisconsin - Madison is one of the best schools in the country for getting a master's degree in fine & studio arts. UW - Madison is a very large public university located in the city of Madison.
Soon after graduating, fine arts master's recipients usually earn around $30,934 in their early careers.
Indiana University - Bloomington is a wonderful decision for individuals pursuing a master's degree in fine & studio arts. Located in the city of Bloomington, IU Bloomington is a public university with a fairly large student population.
Those fine & studio arts students who get their master's degree from Indiana University - Bloomington earn $2,504 more than the average fine arts grad.
UWM is a fairly large public university located in the city of Milwaukee.
Fine & Studio Arts master's degree recipients from University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee earn a boost of around $4,998 over the typical earnings of fine & studio arts graduates.
Located in the town of Charleston, EIU is a public university with a moderately-sized student population.
Those fine & studio arts students who get their master's degree from Eastern Illinois University earn $20,887 more than the standard fine arts student.
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).