a bachelor's 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. As a result, there are many college that offer the degree, making your choice of school a hard one.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 54 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Visual & Performing Arts Bachelor's Degree Schools in New York ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 10,702 bachelor'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 Bachelor's Degree
The visual & performing arts bachelor's 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
The overall quality of a bachelor's degree school is important to ensure a good education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To account for this we consider a school'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.
Early-Career Earnings
One measure we use to determine the quality of a school is to look at the average salary of bachelor's graduates during the early years of their career. That is, everyone wants their bachelor's 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 bachelor's 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 easy is it for visual & performing arts to pay back their student loans after receiving their bachelor's degree.
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 bachelor'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 Bachelor's Degree Schools in New York ranking, along with many other major-related rankings, to help you make that decision.
In addition to our rankings, you can take two colleges and compare them based on the criteria that matters most to you in our unique tool, College Combat.
Test it out when you get a chance! You may also want to bookmark the link and share it with others who are trying to make the college decision.
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Best Schools for Bachelor’s Students to Study Visual & Performing Arts in New York
Explore the top ranked colleges and universities for visual & performing arts students seeking a a bachelor's degree. Only those schools that rank in the top 20% of all the schools we analyze get awarded with a place on this list.
10 Top New York Schools for a Bachelor's in Visual & Performing Arts
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Honorable Mentions
These are some additional schools worth mentioning that are also great but just didn't quite make the cut to earn our top Best Visual & Performing Arts Bachelor's Degree Schools in New York award.
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).