Visual & Performing Arts is above average in terms of popularity with it being the #9 most popular associate degree program in the country. As a result, there are many college that offer the degree, making your choice of school a hard one.
College Factual reviewed 3 schools in Pennsylvania to determine which ones were the best for associate degree seekers in the field of visual & performing arts. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 393 associate degrees in visual & performing arts during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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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. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
A Great Overall School
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 include 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.
Early-Career Earnings
Average early-career salary of those graduating with their associate degree is one indicator we use in our analysis to find the schools that offer the highest-quality education. That is, everyone wants their associate 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 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 schools 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 Pennsylvania 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).