an associate degree in visual & performing arts is more popular than many other degrees. In fact, it ranks #9 out of 38 on popularity of all such degrees in the nation. So, you have a fair amount of options to choose from when looking for a school.
College Factual looked at 29 colleges and universities when compiling its 2025 Best Visual & Performing Arts Associate Degree Schools in the Middle Atlantic Region ranking. Combined, these schools handed out 3,839 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. Below we explain some of the most important factors to consider before making your choice:
Overall Quality Is a Must
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 consider a college's overall Best Colleges ranking which itself looks at a host of various factors like degree completion, educational resources, student body caliber and post-graduation earnings for the school as a whole.
Average Early-Career Salaries
To determine the overall quality of a graduate school, one factor we look at is the average early-career salary of those receiving their associate degree from the school. After all, your associate 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 - 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 complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for visual & performing arts students working on their associate degree.
More Ways to Rank Visual & Performing Arts Schools
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 Visual & Performing Arts Associate Degree Schools in the Middle Atlantic Region list to help you make the college decision.
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The New School is one of the finest schools in the country for getting an associate degree in visual & performing arts. Located in the large city of New York, New School University is a private not-for-profit school with a moderately-sized student population.More information about a associate in visual & performing arts from The New School
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).