Art History Degrees

An art history degree is the study of art, architecture, and objects as evidence about the people who made and used them. You learn to look at a painting, a building, or a piece of furniture and work out who made it, who paid for it, and what it meant at the time, then argue for that reading in writing with the sources behind it. Our directory lists 380 art history programs at 275 schools across 45 states. Art history draws more doubt than most majors. People ask whether it’s a useless degree and whether it’s worth the money. The earnings data tells a more interesting story.

What Is an Art History Degree?

An art history degree is the study of art and architecture as evidence about the societies that produced them. Students learn to look hard at a single object, research everything that surrounded it, and write an argument about what it meant and to whom. Most programs organize the material by period and region, running from the ancient Mediterranean through medieval, Renaissance, modern, and contemporary art, and add applied strands in museum and curatorial work, archives, conservation, and historic preservation. The skills that come out of it are visual literacy and research that has to survive a specialist’s scrutiny. Graduates work in museums, galleries, auction houses, conservation labs, archives, and classrooms.

Two things the standard summaries leave out. Art history and studio art are different degrees. Art history students study the work. Studio art students make it, and those programs usually want a portfolio with the application. Departments also can’t agree on a name. Our directory has 39 programs using a History of Art variant, several of them History of Art and Architecture, so searching one phrase quietly misses the other.

Types of Art History Degrees

Art history is taught at three levels in the United States, and our directory lists programs at all three.

Art History Degree Types

Level	Programs	Schools	States
Bachelor’s	266	263	44
Master’s	72	67	35
Doctoral	42	40	20

Source: historydegree.org program directory, counted August 2026. These are the programs we have cataloged, so treat them as a floor and not as every program that exists (we add programs as we verify them, so the count moves).

Seventy of those schools teach art history at more than one level, and 22 teach it at all three. A department running its own doctorate is a reasonable proxy for depth, because it means the faculty are supervising original research and the library has been built for it.

Bachelor’s Degree in Art History

A bachelor’s in art history takes four years and is where most people enter the field. The degree combines survey courses that cover large spans of time and geography with upper-level seminars on a narrower subject, plus a methods course that teaches you how the discipline argues. It’s a liberal arts degree, so roughly a third of your credits go to the major and the rest to general education and electives (Penn State’s major runs 36 credits out of 120, which is about typical).

Master’s Degree in Art History

A master’s in art history takes one to two years and exists to make you a specialist. You pick a period, a region, or a problem, and you produce a thesis or a qualifying paper on it. This is also the level where the language requirement stops being a suggestion, because reading the scholarship in your field usually means reading it in German, French, Italian, or whatever language the material demands (if you can’t read it, you can’t cite it).

Ph.D. in Art History

A Ph.D. in art history runs five to seven years and trains you to produce original scholarship. It’s the entry requirement for a tenure-track professorship and for senior curatorial posts at large museums. Our directory’s 42 doctoral programs are concentrated in 20 states. That matters if you need to stay near family or a job while you study.

Degrees Related to Art History

Several degrees sit close enough to art history that students end up choosing between them.

• Museum studies is the genuinely separate field, and it overlaps heavily. Twenty-five programs in our directory carry both designations, with titles like B.A. in Art History and Museum Studies.
• Architectural history is usually not a separate degree in our listings. It appears 18 times inside art history, in programs named History of Art and Architecture.
• Arts administration and arts management lead to many of the same employers through the operations side. We don’t currently track these, so check them separately.
• Conservation is not an undergraduate major. The American Institute for Conservation treats it as a graduate specialty with prerequisites you have to plan for early.
• Visual culture and visual studies cover similar ground under a broader name, and our directory lists 11 of them.

What You’ll Study in an Art History Program

Art history curricula are more standardized than the variety of program names suggests. You take foundation surveys, then upper-level courses spread deliberately across periods and regions, then a course on research methods.

The Core: Surveys, Methods, and Breadth Requirements

Art history programs enforce breadth through the credit rules themselves. UT Austin spells the structure out. Students take two foundation courses, then nine upper-division hours that must span three different geographical areas, chosen from Asia and the Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas, plus a research course and a methods course. Duke does the same thing with 11 courses reaching across ancient, medieval, Renaissance and Baroque, modern, and non-Western art. The point is to stop you graduating as a specialist in one century who has never looked seriously at anything else.

Sara, a UCLA art history graduate now running archaeological fieldwork in Peru’s Ica Valley, took Byzantine art, pre-Columbian art, art historical theory, and Southeast Asian art on her way through, and describes the range as the part she valued. She took her first art history course in high school and, in her words, “absolutely loved it.”

Foreign Language Requirements in Art History

A foreign language requirement is standard in art history, and programs handle it very differently. Penn State requires proficiency through the twelfth credit level in one language besides English, plus further work in a second language or beyond that level in the first. UT Austin asks for intermediate proficiency and an additional language on top. Duke only recommends it for undergraduates and saves the hard requirement for the doctorate. Ohio University builds language study into the major alongside the art history and visual culture courses.

Check this before you apply (the course catalog carries it, and the program page usually skips it). Twelve credits is four semesters of a language you may not have picked yet, so it shapes your schedule from the first year in a way no ranking page mentions.

Object-Based Study, Museums, and Digital Methods

Good art history programs teach with real objects, and a campus museum is the clearest sign a school can do it. Penn State’s Palmer Museum of Art runs work-study positions and internships for its own students. Ask about arrangements like that on a campus visit. The digital side has grown too, covering cataloging systems, digitized archives, and imaging, and those are the skills that transfer most directly into collections work.

Art History Admissions and Funding

What Art History Programs Look For

Undergraduate art history admission is normally just university admission, with no portfolio and no audition. You declare the major once you’re enrolled, sometimes after a foundation course. Graduate admission works differently. Programs read a writing sample as the main evidence, alongside a statement explaining what you want to work on, and they’ll ask what languages you already read.

Cost varies enormously by sector. Data USA puts median in-state tuition at public institutions at $8,772 against $55,500 at private ones. That gap is worth taking seriously in a field where a graduate degree is common.

Funding and Assistantships

Funding in art history is a graduate story. Every funded commitment we can point to sits at master’s or doctoral level, and there’s no undergraduate equivalent, so an art history bachelor’s is paid for the way any other bachelor’s is.

At graduate level the packages can be genuinely comprehensive. The UC Davis master’s program states that all its students are fully funded, covering tuition remission, a living stipend, guaranteed research travel money, a health insurance subsidy, most fees, and a salary attached to a teaching, research, or reader assistantship. The department says most of its students finish without taking on additional debt. At doctoral level, the University of Chicago gives every art history doctoral student a stipend, full tuition, and health insurance, then adds discretionary research funds of $5,000 before the dissertation and $10,000 after, usable for archive and museum travel, language study, conference costs, and image permissions.

Read those as real examples and not as the norm. UC Davis calls its own arrangement exceptional, and that word is a claim about how rare full funding is, made by a department in a position to know (departments don’t usually advertise their own rarity). Ask each program directly what it funds, how many students it funds, and for how many years.

Online Art History Degrees

Online art history degrees exist, but the options are limited, and the reasons are built into the subject. Our directory currently lists four online art history programs across two institutions, Carlow University in Pennsylvania and Lindenwood University in Missouri, three at bachelor’s level and one master’s. Object study, collections access, and language work are all harder to deliver at a distance. That’s a plausible explanation for thin provision (four is what we can verify, and undercounting beats padding).

Our listings are a floor here as everywhere, so more may exist than we have cataloged. We cover the format in detail on our online art history degrees page.

What Can You Do with an Art History Degree?

Art history graduates work across museums, the commercial art trade, conservation labs, archives, education, and a long tail of fields that simply want the research and writing.

Museums, Galleries, and Curatorial Work

Museum work is the route most art history students picture, and it covers more roles than curator. Registrars track what the museum owns and where it is, education staff design programs for schools and adult visitors, and exhibition designers turn research into rooms people walk through.

Errol, who finished a VCU art history master’s with a museum studies concentration in 2022 and now manages student engagement at the Harn Museum of Art at the University of Florida, credits the concentration with getting him in the door. It “let me gain vital experience through a required internship and courses on museum education,” he told the university. That pattern holds generally. The internship is what turns the degree into a hire.

The Commercial Art Market

The commercial art world employs art history graduates in galleries, auction houses, art advisories, art fairs, and the shipping and insurance businesses that serve them. The work is closer to sales, logistics, and client relationships than to scholarship, and it moves faster than museum work does. The pay follows a different pattern too.

Conservation

Conservation is a graduate path with undergraduate prerequisites, so it has to be planned early. The American Institute for Conservation says graduate programs expect coursework in the sciences, humanities, and studio art, and that surprises art history students who assumed the sciences were behind them (plan it from year one or it won’t fit). AIC also expects applicants to arrive with practical experience, gained through pre-program volunteering, internships, or technician work, and notes that those openings are “not always formally announced and are often arranged by contacting a conservation lab” directly. A bachelor’s alone, AIC states plainly, “does not prepare you to become a professional conservator without additional training.”

Teaching and Academic Work

Teaching art history at college level requires a doctorate. The Bureau of Labor Statistics counts 101,500 postsecondary art, drama, and music teachers, with a median wage of $80,360 and a 90th percentile of $178,670. That category combines three disciplines and BLS doesn’t separate art history out, so read it as the order of magnitude for the professor route.

Where Art History Graduates Actually Go

Art history majors leave arts work more often than other arts graduates do. The Strategic National Arts Alumni Project studied 62,046 arts alumni who had held arts-based work at some point, 1,993 of them art history majors, and found that art history graduates were less likely to stay in the arts than architecture or design graduates. That reads as a failure only if you assume the degree is vocational. It’s the same transferable-skill story history tells, where the training travels into law, publishing, government, and business.

Art History Salaries

Three different sources answer three different questions here, and they are not interchangeable.

What Art History Majors Earn

Art history majors earn a median of $45,000 in early career and $91,000 by mid-career, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The bank tracks outcomes by undergraduate major using Census data. The same table puts unemployment at 6.7% and underemployment at 45.3%. Early career means ages 22 to 27 and mid-career means 35 to 45, so the gap between those two numbers is roughly a decade of work.

What Museum Jobs Pay

Museum salaries have a wide and well-documented ladder. The Association of Art Museum Directors’ 2025 Salary Survey, which collected FY24 data from 190 of its 224 member museums, puts the median curatorial assistant at $50,100 and the median chief curator at $154,400. Assistant conservators sit at $62,000.

Institution size matters more than job title. A chief curator averages $107,900 at museums with budgets under $5 million and $239,400 at museums above $45 million, so the same title pays more than twice as much depending on where you hold it. These figures describe AAMD member museums, which are the larger and better-funded art museums, and AAMD warns against assuming they apply to museums in other disciplines.

What the Commercial Art Market Pays

Commercial art world salaries are documented mainly by the trade itself. The SML Art Market Talent Report 2025, a survey by art world recruitment firm Sophie Macpherson Ltd with research partner ArtTactic, puts US gallery salaries at $52,000 for an administrator and $120,000 for a director. Auction houses run from $50,000 to $150,000 across the same range of seniority. Because the publisher recruits for this market, and because the sample is self-selected rather than random, treat these as indicative.

The comparison across the two sectors is the useful part. A gallery administrator and a curatorial assistant start within about $2,000 of each other. The ceilings then separate, with a gallery director at $120,000 against a chief curator at $154,400.

How to Choose an Art History Program

A few things separate a strong art history program from a weak one, and rankings rarely measure any of them.

• Accreditation. Confirm regional accreditation, and look for NASAD membership where the department sits inside an art school. An official .edu domain is the first thing to check.
• A teaching collection. A campus museum or study collection means you handle objects instead of only seeing slides.
• Museum and auction house partnerships. Ask whether internships are formal agreements or something students arrange alone.
• Language support. Given how much the requirements vary, check what the department expects and whether the university teaches the language you’ll need.
• Faculty research areas. Published, active faculty in your period matter more at graduate level than institutional reputation does.
• Published outcomes. Ask where graduates went in the last three years, and for doctoral programs, ask specifically about placement.

Is an Art History Degree Worth It?

Art history has a public reputation problem, and its most famous expression came from a sitting president. Speaking at a General Electric plant in Wisconsin on January 30, 2014, President Obama said that “folks can make a lot more, potentially, with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree.” He corrected himself in the same breath, adding that there was “nothing wrong with an art history degree, I love art history.”

The story didn’t end there. Ann Johns, a senior lecturer in art and art history at the University of Texas at Austin, wrote to the White House. Obama replied by hand, and UT Austin published the note: “Let me apologize for my off-the-cuff remarks. I was making a point about the jobs market, not the value of art history.”

The federal data complicates the reputation in an interesting way. Art history majors have higher early-career unemployment than history majors, 6.7% against 4.3%, so the first years genuinely are harder. By mid-career the ranking flips, with art history at $91,000 against history’s $80,000, and art history’s underemployment sits lower at 45.3% against 50.1%. The degree starts harder and ends better.

Both halves of that are true at once, and neither is a promise. A median describes a population and says nothing about your own outcome. A field this small rewards students who build something specific alongside the degree. Languages help. So does an internship that turns into a reference, or the science coursework that opens conservation.

Art History Organizations and Resources

• College Art Association is the main professional body for art historians and studio artists in the US, and runs the field’s largest annual conference and its job listings.
• Association for Art History is the UK equivalent, and worth watching if you’re considering study or work abroad.
• American Institute for Conservation publishes the conservation career pathway and lists the accredited graduate programs.
• Association of Art Museum Directors publishes the annual salary survey that sets the benchmark for art museum pay.
• National Association of Schools of Art and Design accredits art and design units at US institutions.
• Strategic National Arts Alumni Project publishes research on what happens to arts graduates after they finish.

Frequently Asked Questions