a bachelor's degree in dance is more popular than many other degrees. In fact, it ranks #115 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.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 96 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Dance Bachelor's Degree Schools ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 2,711 bachelor's degrees in dance during the 2021-2022 academic year.
Choosing a Great Dance School for Your Bachelor's Degree
Your choice of dance for getting your bachelor's degree school matters. 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 make it into this list a school must rank well in our overall Best Colleges ranking. This ranking considered factors such as graduation rates, overall graduate earnings and other educational resources to identify great colleges and universities.
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
In addition to the above, you should consider some of the following factors:
Major Focus - How much a school focuses on dance students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - How many other dance students want to attend this school to pursue a bachelor's degree.
Educational Resources - The amount of money and other resources allocated to students while they are pursuing their degree. These resources include such things as number of students per instructor and education expenditures per student.
Student Debt - How easy is it for dance 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 dance related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for dance students working on their bachelor's degree.
Since picking the right college can be one of the most important decisions of your life, we've developed the Best Dance Bachelor's Degree Schools 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.
Best Schools for Bachelor’s Students to Study Dance in the United States
Below you'll see a list of the best colleges and universities for pursuing a bachelor's degree in dance. Only those schools that rank in the top 20% of all the schools we analyze get awarded with a place on this list.
New York University is one of the finest schools in the country for getting a bachelor's degree in dance. Located in the city of New York, NYU is a private not-for-profit university with a fairly large student population.More information about a bachelor’s in dance from New York University
UC Irvine is a very large public university located in the city of Irvine.
Bachelor's recipients from the dance degree program at University of California - Irvine get $5,599 more than the typical college graduate with the same degree shortly after graduation.
USC is a fairly large private not-for-profit university located in the city of Los Angeles.
Dance bachelor's degree recipients from University of Southern California receive an earnings boost of around $3,140 above the average earnings of dance majors.
Iowa is a fairly large public university located in the city of Iowa City.
Dance bachelor's degree recipients from University of Iowa get an earnings boost of approximately $7,840 above the average earnings of dance graduates.
Rest of the Top Best Dance Bachelor's Degree Schools
Additional Noteworthy Schools
These are some additional schools worth mentioning that are also great but just didn't quite make the cut to earn our top Best Dance Bachelor's Degree Schools 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).