If you plan on getting your bachelor's degree in general visual & performing arts, you won't be alone since the degree program is ranked #94 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 23 schools in the Southeast Region to determine which ones were the best for general visual & performing arts students pursuing a bachelor's degree. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 1,780 bachelor's degrees in general visual & performing arts during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great General Visual & Performing Arts School for Your Bachelor's Degree
The visual arts bachelor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality visual arts program can vary widely even among the top schools. 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 account for this we consider a college's overall Best Colleges ranking which itself looks at a host of different 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 much a school focuses on general visual & performing arts students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - How many other general visual & performing arts students want to attend this school to pursue a bachelor'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 general visual & performing 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 general visual & performing arts related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for general visual & performing arts students working on their bachelor's degree.
When choosing the right school for you, it's important to arm yourself with all the facts you can. To that end, we've created a number of major-specific rankings, including this Best General Visual & Performing Arts Bachelor's Degree Schools in the Southeast Region list to help you make the college decision.
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 Florida is one of the best schools in the country for getting a bachelor's degree in general visual & performing arts. UF is a very large public university located in the midsize city of Gainesville.
Those general visual & performing arts students who get their bachelor's degree from University of Florida make $4,138 more than the standard visual arts student.
George Mason University is one of the finest schools in the country for getting a bachelor's degree in general visual & performing arts. Located in the suburb of Fairfax, GMU is a public university with a very large student population.
Bachelor's recipients from the general visual & performing arts program at George Mason University get $5,450 more than the typical graduate with the same degree shortly after graduation.
University of Central Florida is one of the best schools in the country for getting a bachelor's degree in general visual & performing arts. Located in the large suburb of Orlando, UCF is a public university with a very large student population.
Bachelor's recipients from the general visual & performing arts program at University of Central Florida get $2,387 more than the typical graduate in this field shortly after graduation.
University of Kentucky is a great choice for individuals interested in a bachelor's degree in general visual & performing arts. Located in the city of Lexington, UK is a public university with a fairly large student population.
Bachelor's graduates who receive their degree from the visual arts program make about $26,343 in their early career salary.
Longwood is a small public university located in the town of Farmville.
Bachelor's recipients from the general visual & performing arts degree program at Longwood University get $8,321 more than the standard graduate with the same degree shortly after graduation.
UF Online is a moderately-sized public university located in the city of Gainesville.
Bachelor's recipients from the general visual & performing arts program at University of Florida-Online earn $4,138 more than the average college graduate in this field when they enter the workforce.
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 visual arts bachelor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality visual arts program can vary widely even among the top schools. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
