If you plan on getting your associate degree in visual & performing arts, you won't be alone since the degree program is ranked #9 in the country in terms of popularity. This means you won't have too much trouble finding schools that offer the degree.
College Factual looked at 12 colleges and universities when compiling its 2025 Best Visual & Performing Arts Associate Degree Schools in the Far Western US Region ranking. Combined, these schools handed out 6,918 associate degrees in visual & performing arts to qualified students.
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Choosing a Great Visual & Performing Arts School for Your Associate Degree
The visual & performing arts associate 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. 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 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.
Average Earnings
One measure we use to determine the quality of a school is to look at the average salary of associate graduates during the early years of their career. This is because one of the main reasons people pursue their associate 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 visual & performing arts students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - How many other visual & performing arts students want to attend this school to pursue a associate 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 much debt visual & performing arts students go into to obtain their associate 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 full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for visual & performing arts students working on their associate 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 Associate Degree Schools in the Far Western US 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).
The visual & performing arts associate 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. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
