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.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 6 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Visual & Performing Arts Associate Degree Schools in the Rocky Mountains Region ranking. Combined, these schools handed out 684 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. 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 account for this we include a school's overall Best Colleges ranking which itself looks at a collection of different 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 colleges 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 Rocky Mountains Region list to help you make the college 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
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.
