If you plan on getting your bachelor's degree in
general visual & performing arts, you won't be alone since the degree program is ranked #94 in the country in terms of popularity. 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 10 schools in the Great Lakes Region to determine which ones were the best for general visual & performing arts students pursuing a bachelor's degree. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 286 bachelor's degrees in general visual & performing arts during the 2022-2023 academic year.
What's on this page: * Our Methodology
The visual arts bachelor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality visual arts 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 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
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 visual & performing arts students vs. other majors.
- Major Demand - How many other general 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 general 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 general visual & performing arts related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for general visual & performing arts students working on their bachelor's degree.
One Size Does Not Fit All
The visual arts school you choose to invest your time and money in matters. To help you make the decision that is right for you, we've developed a number of major-specific rankings, including this list of the Best General Visual & Performing Arts Bachelor's Degree Schools in the Great Lakes Region.
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.