a doctor's degree in visual & performing arts is more popular than many other degrees. In fact, it ranks #14 out of 36 on popularity of all such degrees in the nation. This means you won't have too much trouble finding schools that offer the degree.
College Factual looked at 5 colleges and universities when compiling its 2025 Best Visual & Performing Arts Doctor's Degree Schools in the Plains States Region ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 130 doctor's degrees in visual & performing arts during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great Visual & Performing Arts School for Your Doctor's Degree
Your choice of visual & performing arts for getting your doctor'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. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
Quality Overall Is Important
A school that excels in educating for a particular major and degree level must be a great school overall as well. To take this into account we consider a college's overall Best Colleges for a Doctor's Degree ranking which itself looks at a combination of different 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 doctor's degree from the school. After all, your doctor's degree won't mean much if it doesn't help you find a job that will help you earn a living.
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 visual & performing arts students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - The number of visual & performing arts students who choose to seek a doctor's 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.
Student Debt - How much debt visual & performing arts students go into to obtain their doctor'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 visual & performing arts related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for visual & performing arts students working on their doctor's degree.
More Ways to Rank Visual & Performing Arts Schools
Since picking the right college can be one of the most important decisions of your life, we've developed the Best Visual & Performing Arts Doctor's Degree Schools in the Plains States Region ranking, along with many other major-related rankings, to help you make that decision.
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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 visual & performing arts for getting your doctor'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. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
