I really believe, and this is what I try to tell my students, that the thing that comes easily to you in the beginning is the thing you should be exploring.
– Artist, Marilyn Minter
Now that we’ve considered the differences between art school and university art programs, as well as what to expect from a top program in New York City versus the rest of the country, we’ll move onto arts programs at some of the most selective and sought after universities: The Ivies.
Why choose an Ivy League university? You can expect a rigorous and unparalleled education, accomplished faculty, state of the art facilities and a name that bears weight in all aspects of professional life and beyond.
Attending any Ivy League is an achievement, but each has its own distinct offerings, so it can sometimes be difficult to discern which one is right for you. For example, Brown is known for its Open Curriculum and its art department offers a dual degree AB/BFA with RISD, which we touch more on in Post 8. Columbia has the strictest curriculum requirements, and its campus is in the heart of New York City. Cornell offers a BFA, whereas the other Ivies offer BA or ABs, which can be less studio intensive. Princeton has a standout musical theater program and Yale’s art program is known especially for sculpture, painting, and photography. Our chart below offers highlights of each university’s undergraduate art programs to help you familiarize yourself with their specific offerings. Then, we’ll explore Yale’s BA and Princeton’s AB programs to gain an understanding of what majoring in art at these Ivy League universities is like.
| Name | Princeton – Lewis Center for the Creative and Performing Arts | Yale | Cornell | Columbia | Brown | Dartmouth |
| Location | Princeton, NJ | New Haven, CT | Ithaca, NY | New York, NY | Providence, RI | Hanover, NH |
| Total Number of Undergrad | 5,727 | 6,749 | 16,148 | 9,704 | 7,272 | 4,570 |
| Arts Majors | Only minors are offered through the Lewis Center, not majors | 1 Major | 1 Major | 1 Major | 1 Major | 1 Major |
| Arts Minors | 4 Minors | No certificates (minors) in Visual Arts | 1 Minor | 1 Minor | No certificates (minors) in Visual Arts | No minors in Visual Arts |
| Factors to Consider | More so than other Ivies, Princeton’s undergraduate education is its primary focus, which means it offers small workshops and the opportunity to be individually mentored by distinguished faculty, especially for the required independent work in junior and senior years. Princeton is only an hour and a half train ride from NYC, which means it has access to standout professors and visiting artists who live in NYC. | Yale School of Art is known for its painting/drawing and photography specialties. Unlike, Princeton, Yale has more graduate students than undergraduates, which can mean less focus on undergraduate study but also more opportunities to learn from advanced students. You will not be admitted to the art program until your sophomore year after you apply as a freshman. The program is highly conceptual, so if you are looking for a more hands-on, immersive experience that focuses on technique and studio time, Yale might not be the best fit. | Cornell’s undergraduate art program combines intensive studio time with a highly individualized selection of interdisciplinary electives. This flexibility of curriculum is unique amongst the Ivies. Cornell’s Art, Architecture and Planning (AAP) department is one of the smallest (and most selective) at the school. Cornell’s location in Ithaca—a town of about 30,000—provides a more insular campus experience amidst idyllic natural elements. | Columbia is known for its rigorous, demanding, and highly regarded Core Curriculum, which students focus on for their first two years. Columbia is also notable for its location in the heart of New York City, which gives students access to NYC’s thriving art scene and extensive professional network. | Like Princeton, Brown focuses heavily on its undergraduate student body. It is also known for its Open Curriculum, which allows students to design their own degree. Brown is a place where highly flexible and independent critical thinkers excel. Brown is also located within walking distance to and shares professors with RISD, one of the top art schools in the country. Brown also offers a unique combined degree program. | Dartmouth is the smallest Ivy, which means smaller classes and workshops, as well as more personal attention from professors. Dartmouth is known for its D-Plan, a highly personalized educational experience which allows students to design their own curriculum and schedule. The art department also has an internship program that employs ~five graduating studio art majors each year. |
| Atmosphere of program | With its close proximity to NYC, Princeton’s campus art scene is quite lively. In addition to top-notch artist talks and exhibitions, and the robust Princeton University Art Museum, the campus is home to the Tony award-winning McCarter Theater Center. Because the school’s focus is centered around its undergraduate students, you’ll find a vibrant and bustling collegiate atmosphere with a lot of student activity. | Yale’s undergraduate art majors are serious, hard-working, and creative. Yale is known for its fun and welcoming residential life, fostered by its Residential College system, as well as its lively campus arts scene. It is the only major research university to also boast a top-ranked, arts school, music school, architecture school, and drama school. | Cornell has the largest undergraduate population of any Ivy. Because it is the only Ivy that is also a land-grant university, students who are residents of New York State can attend one of the four NYS contract colleges incorporated into Cornell. It is noted for its culture of “radical openness,” featuring an eclectic mix of different types of people, a school where anyone can find their place. | While Columbia will connect you with a diverse and exceptional group of students and faculty, its lack of an on-campus arts community has been a concern for prospective students. This has been attributed to having just one generalized major, Visual Arts, as opposed to individual specialties. For many, their artistic community on campus has been self-forged. | Brown is known for its experimental and creatively unique student body, curriculum, and faculty, as well as its academic freedom, all of which result in an atmosphere of openness and innovation that embraces unconventional teaching, art-making, and thinking. Overall, students are open, welcoming and supportive of one another. | Dartmouth students are talented and ambitious and help challenge one another while also learning from each other. Hanover is a small city, and Dartmouth’s campus life is central to it. Its small student population makes for a close-knit student body, but can, at times, also feel like living in a small town where everyone knows who you are and what you’re doing. For some that can be a comfort and for others it can feel claustrophobic. |
Program Spotlight: Yale University
Yale College – Yale’s undergraduate division – offers its students a Bachelors of Arts with a major in Art. While the degree itself may differ in terms of letters (BA versus BFA), Yale’s program is identical to a traditional BFA program. The first two years of the program are dedicated to students’ foundational knowledge of art, from theory to media surveys to visual formation and articulation. Between the second and third years, students participate in a Sophomore Review in order to be officially accepted into the major and then proceed into a more specialized artistic discipline and higher-level courses. Yale’s meticulous curriculum requires students to develop a practice of rigor that will serve them once they graduate and begin their lives as working artists.
In a recent alumni panel, Yale alum, Angela Fraleigh – a painter whose work is preoccupied with themes of gender, sexuality, femininity, and power dynamics – spoke about her time in the program, saying, “I think that the program was really incredible at preparing me for how hard [the art world] can be, how critical it can be…” She went on to note that when she left the program she felt, “like I understood what being an artist really was.”
In the same panel, Chloë Bass, a conceptual artist rooted in performance and social practice mentioned the helpful power of Yale’s name brand for artists, whose careers are at the whims of a very competitive and fickle industry. She, herself, had recently secured a tenure track professorship at Queens College partly because the then-President was a fellow Yale alum. “He came right up to me at this party for all the new faculty and was like, ‘Yale girl.’ I was like, ‘Wait, what?’ So, there’s that, right?”
But Yale (or even Princeton, as we’ll soon discover) isn’t all about rigor, name power, and academic excellence – though those are three crucial aspects of attending. In particular, Yale’s art students tend to fare exceptionally well in the art world because the school itself is so selective when choosing which students to let in. At Yale, your cohort will consist of the top 5-6% of applicants – budding artists who are exceptionally gifted and serious about their practice. These are also the artists who will form your community after you leave.
Yale is positioned to provide its students with the finest education both in terms of peer groups and critiques from some of the country’s most renowned professional artists. Fraleigh, whose paintings present counter narratives for our past and future, also mentioned how the feedback from her instructors and fellow students was integral to her growth as an artist: “That’s where the program really provided for me, because I was able to get to that place where I didn’t care about anybody else’s opinion and I really just wanted to do what I wanted to do, and…that’s when I made the work that I’m still making today.”
Yale alums also acknowledge the university’s academic excellence as an influence on their art during their time there. Yale offers its art students a well-rounded and extensive education with the assumption that art is bolstered by outside influences, studies in other subjects, and observations of the world around you. Its art program is consistently ranked one of the top in the country – along with UCLA, which we profile in Post 7, and SAIC and RISD, which we profile in Post 5. Attending Yale is a special privilege that will result in a nuanced and complex development of your art.
Program Spotlight: Princeton University
While Yale’s art program is widely lauded, the Program in Visual Arts at Princeton is equally compelling. Like Yale, Princeton doesn’t offer a BFA, but rather an AB (analogous to the BA degree). Don’t let the letters fool you. Princeton’s AB, like any other university BFA – as we discussed in Post 3 of this series – offers a well-rounded education that incorporates a full university curriculum alongside the study of art. Beyond the exceptional facilities, faculty, and education, Princeton allows its students the flexibility of a major or a minor in art.
The Program in Visual Arts is broken into two tracks: The Practice of Art track or the Visual Arts minor. The PA track allows students to major in studio art, spending most of their time in studio intensives and culminating with a creative senior thesis. The Visual Arts minor provides access to studio courses for those students seeking to practice art without a more intense commitment and required thesis. Choosing which path is right for you will be a deeply personal choice. Oscar-winning filmmaker and Princeton alum, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, often tells prospective students, “This is the most special time in your life when you’re free to take those risks and those risks define who you are.” In some cases, you might not know which is best at first. Vasarhelyi didn’t.
She entered Princeton to study medicine, but halfway through realized she was an artist. She began to study film and comparative literature and made her first film for her creative senior thesis. She recalls her time in the program fondly, saying, “What Princeton became for me was this incredibly safe space for me to explore and to try things and to risk stuff.” The summer between her junior and senior year, she received travel funding from Princeton to film her senior thesis in Kosovo – a film she ultimately premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. Reflecting on Princeton’s impact on her career as an artist and filmmaker, Vasarhelyi says, “That space to be so creative and daring and not even understand mistakes and then have people who are so genuinely curious as well as intellectually amazing was a real privilege for me.”
Many artists credit the resources of Princeton and the opportunity it provides its students to learn from professional award-winning artists, writers, and filmmakers on faculty. Jenny Xie, the National Book Award-finalist and poet, talks of her time studying the arts at Princeton as integral to the start of her career. “When I entered Princeton, I had a lot of enthusiasm and I loved reading poetry. I think I was quite stunned by the kinds of access I had to other publishing writers as an 18-year-old. I was able to take courses with Tracy K. Smith. There was something about Tracy and the kind of trust she had and how she communicated that felt invaluable at that time.”
Another artist, Lex Brown, whose multimedia installations include drawing and live performance, mentioned Princeton’s cerebral atmosphere as a huge influence on her work then and now. She says, “I really liked being at Princeton. I really liked the program. Looking back on it, I feel like I had a very conceptual introduction to art, which for me worked, because I’m very conceptually-oriented…That way of thinking about art, I felt like I was really introduced to at school by Martha Friedman and Fia Backström.” Brown is referring to Princeton faculty members and professional artists, Martha Friedman, a sculptor and now the director of the University’s Program in Visual Arts, as well as the famed interdisciplinary artist and writer, Fia Backstõm, whose obsession with language dominates her installations and performances.
There is no end to the accomplished artists that have found a supportive, rigorous, and well-rounded arts education at Princeton, and who have gone on to succeed in their field thanks to the guidance and tutelage of Princeton’s renowned faculty. Beyond that, though, Princeton is known for its close-knit alumni network, and its proximity to New York City means you have access to all the city has to offer while still enjoying the intimacy of a small, liberal arts college. Many of Princeton’s professors are working artists commuting from the city, and its Hodder Fellowship, as well as its Arts Fellowship, attract contemporary working artists to campus each year for students to meet and learn from. It is a challenging, diverse, and thought-provoking environment that brings young artists together to help them shape their artistic careers.
Attending an Ivy League university is a special privilege. Whether you choose Yale, Princeton, or another Ivy, you can count on a solid foundation on which to build your career as an artist and access some of the greatest artists of our time who will help you discern where your creative strengths lie. At an Ivy, even as you hone your craft, you will undoubtedly receive an exceptional education across all fronts, elevating your awareness and preparing you for success as an artist, as a professional, and as a well-rounded human being.
The college admissions process can be overwhelming, and it may feel difficult to know where to start. At Collegiate Gateway, we are eager to share our expertise and guide you on your admissions strategy and the path to your “best fit” college. Please feel free to contact us! As always, we’re happy to help!
