a bachelor's degree in general architecture is more popular than many other degrees. In fact, it ranks #93 out of 363 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.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 3 schools in Illinois to determine which ones were the best for general architecture students pursuing a bachelor's degree. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 128 bachelor's degrees in general architecture during the 2022-2023 academic year.
Choosing a Great General Architecture School for Your Bachelor's Degree
The architecture bachelor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality architecture program can vary widely even among the top schools. 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 quality education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To take this into account we consider a college'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
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 much a school focuses on general architecture students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - How many other general architecture 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 general architecture 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 general architecture related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for general architecture students working on their bachelor's degree.
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 General Architecture Bachelor's Degree Schools in Illinois list to help you make the college 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.
Best Schools for Bachelor’s Students to Study General Architecture in Illinois
Below you'll see a list of the best colleges and universities for pursuing a bachelor's degree in general architecture.
Top Illinois Schools for a Bachelor's in Architecture
University of Illinois at Chicago is one of the finest schools in the United States for getting a bachelor's degree in general architecture. Located in the large city of Chicago, UIC is a public university with a fairly large student population.
Students who graduate with their bachelor's from the architecture program report average early career earnings of $27,525.
Any student pursuing a degree in a bachelor's degree in general architecture has to look into Judson University. Located in the medium-sized city of Elgin, Judson is a private not-for-profit university with a small student population.
Students who graduate with their bachelor's from the architecture program report average early career wages of $41,033.
It is difficult to beat Southern Illinois University Carbondale if you wish to pursue a bachelor's degree in general architecture. Located in the distant town of Carbondale, SIUC is a public university with a fairly large student population.
Bachelor's recipients from the general architecture major at Southern Illinois University Carbondale make $3,411 more than the typical college graduate with the same degree shortly after graduation.
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 architecture bachelor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality architecture program can vary widely even among the top schools. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
