On This Page:
Online art history degrees are rare. Our directory lists 264 art history bachelor’s programs taught on campus, and we could verify only eight that run online or partly online.
If you’re set on studying art history without moving house or leaving your job, those few options are worth knowing properly. We found eight and would recommend five. Below we rank those six, set out what each degree costs, and cover what you should know before committing to a visual subject taught through a screen.
Can You Earn an Art History Degree Online?
Yes, you can earn a bachelor’s degree in art history entirely online, and you can do it at a regionally accredited public university rather than somewhere you’ve never heard of.
The catch is how few options there are. We were able to verify eight online or partly online art history bachelor’s programs. Three of those are fully online. Three more mix online coursework with some in-person work, and their own pages are clear about it. The last two we set aside. One is a for-profit whose accreditation is currently under sanction. The other sells art history as a specialization inside a liberal arts degree you can only start after finishing an associate degree.
The three fully online programs are the ones most people end up choosing between:
- University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, a B.A. in Art History, 120 credits with 30 in the major.
- Lindenwood University, a B.A. in Art History and Visual Culture, 120 credits and 100% online.
- Arizona State University, an online Bachelor of Arts in Art with a concentration in art history.
For comparison, our directory lists 264 art history bachelor’s programs on campus. The online share of this field is tiny, and that is not an accident.
The Best Online Art History Degrees of 2026–2027
We rank five online art history bachelor’s degrees below. Every one holds recognized regional accreditation, and the ranking is built on how many students finish, how much art history the school actually graduates, and what the whole degree costs.
We exclude two programs that turned up in the same search. Academy of Art University is a for-profit whose accreditor lists it as under warning. Newlane University sells art history as a specialization inside a liberal arts degree and requires an associate degree first. Neither is a scandal, but we decided to focus our rankings on programs without an open question hanging over them.
Programs are grouped before they are scored. Fully online comes first, then the programs that mix online and in-person study (we would rather you knew that going in than found out in week one). Full details are in the methodology below.
| Rank | School | Program | Total cost | Grad + transfer rate (8-yr) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee | B.A. in Art History | $47,400 | 78% |
| 2 | Lindenwood University | B.A. in Art History and Visual Culture | $63,000 | 79% |
| 3 | Arizona State University | Online B.A. in Art, Art History Concentration | $76,012 | 70% |
| 4 | Portland State University | B.A. or B.S. in Art History | $144,996 | 78% |
| 5 | Utah Valley University | B.A. in Art History | $34,200 | 69% |
The Best Online Art History Degrees of 2026–2027
1 University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Overview | B.A. in Art History
- Availability: Online
- Estimated Total Cost: $47,400
- Accreditation: Higher Learning Commission (HLC)
Program Summary
If you want one recommendation and no further reading, this is it. UWM graduates more art history majors than any other fully online program here, about ten a year, and it charges $47,400 for the whole degree regardless of where you live. That last part matters more than it sounds. Most public universities charge out-of-state students two or three times the resident rate (often the single biggest number in the whole decision). UWM doesn’t.
You get a real B.A. in Art History, 120 credits with 30 in the major, from a department that also runs a master’s. The school says the online version gives you the same courses as the campus one. It is also the only program here whose art history degree carries NASAD accreditation. That is unusual, though it is not something you should require.
2 Lindenwood University
Overview | B.A. in Art History and Visual Culture
- Availability: Online
- Estimated Total Cost: $63,000
- Accreditation: Higher Learning Commission (HLC)
Program Summary
Lindenwood is our pick if you’re transferring in with credit already banked. It takes up to 90 credits, so you could arrive 30 credits from a finished degree. The full price is $525 a credit, or about $63,000.
The curriculum is the most transparent of any program here, published course by course. There’s a three-part global art history sequence, period courses in ancient, medieval and Baroque art, and a six-credit capstone built around a research methods course. Lindenwood also encourages online students into internships and names where they’ve gone. The list includes the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Nelson-Atkins Museum and the Missouri History Museum. For an online program, that’s a genuinely strong answer to “how do I get experience?”
3 Arizona State University
Overview | Online B.A. in Art, Art History Concentration
- Availability: Online
- Estimated Total Cost: $76,012
- Accreditation: Higher Learning Commission (HLC)
Program Summary
Pick ASU for the name on the diploma and the flexibility. The machinery around this degree is what you’re buying. There are multiple start dates through the year, a large course catalog, and a version of the program that runs on campus.
Two things to weigh. First, the degree is a Bachelor of Arts in Art. Art history is the concentration inside it, so the diploma will say Art. Second, ASU’s online arm graduates 44% of its students within eight years. That is the lowest completion figure here, and it travels with the university’s open-access admissions. At $76,012 it’s also the priciest of the fully online three. ASU also states that its diplomas don’t distinguish between online and in-person study. That matters to a lot of people weighing this decision.
4 Portland State University
Overview | B.A. or B.S. in Art History
- Availability: Hybrid
- Estimated Total Cost: $144,996
- Accreditation: Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities (NWCCU)
Program Summary
Portland State runs the largest art history program in this ranking, graduating about 18 majors a year. That’s three times what Utah Valley produces and comfortably ahead of every other program we could measure.
The catalog shows where that size goes. You can take Italian Renaissance Art, Chinese Painting, Islamic Art and Latin American Women Artists, alongside thematic courses with titles like Medieval Monsters and Nature into Art. Upper-division classes run 15 to 35 students, there’s a senior thesis option, and the department funds travel grants for independent research as well as faculty-led group trips to museums outside Portland. Students can also pick up a reduced-price annual pass to the Portland Art Museum through a program the department takes part in.
Read the delivery carefully. PSU’s own page lists the delivery method as in person, with online courses offered but subject to availability. Read that as a campus degree you may be able to take substantially online. It’s a different proposition from the three above, and several of the perks above assume you’re in Portland. It’s also the most expensive option on this list at $144,996 for non-residents across four years, because PSU charges standard non-resident tuition rather than an online rate.
5 Utah Valley University
Overview | B.A. in Art History
- Availability: Hybrid (UVU calls it Online-Plus)
- Estimated Total Cost: $34,200
- Accreditation: Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities (NWCCU)
Program Summary
UVU is the value choice, and it isn’t close. At $285 a credit for non-residents studying online, the whole degree runs about $34,200, less than a quarter of what Portland State costs, and the lowest total on this list.
The degree is built around three stated outcomes, and they’re more specific than most program pages manage. Visual literacy means reading styles, movements and technique in the work itself. Professional excellence covers scholarly research, academic writing and building an argument that holds original insight. Creative diversity is about cultural and historical context, and about tracing how meaning gets made across different cultures and periods. There’s also a 12-credit foreign language requirement. That’s four semesters, and it wants planning from your first term.
The format is the catch. UVU calls it Online-Plus and describes it as combining online, flexible and in-person learning, so budget for some campus presence before you treat this as a distance degree.
Methodology behind Our Art History Degree Rankings
We scored five programs on four factors, weighted like this:
- Completion, 30%. The federal eight-year graduation rate from the Outcome Measures survey. It counts part-time and transfer students, so it describes online populations fairly. We rank on the strict graduation rate, so no school climbs by shedding students, but the figure we display is the graduation-plus-transfer rate, because a student who transferred somewhere else to finish hasn’t dropped out.
- Program substance, 30%. Whether the degree is titled art history or sits inside a broader art degree, plus whether the school teaches art history at master’s or doctoral level too. A department running its own graduate program is a reasonable sign of depth.
- Program scale, 20%. How many art history majors the school actually graduates, using the federal six-digit code for art history rather than the four-digit bucket that mixes it with painting and ceramics.
- Affordability, 20%. Total cost of the whole degree at the online or non-resident rate. We use the total instead of a per-credit price because Portland State runs 180 quarter credits against everyone else’s 120 semester credits, so per-credit figures are misleading.
The tiering is the part worth understanding. Programs are sorted into groups before any score is compared. Fully online programs rank first, then programs that combine online and in-person study, and both sit above anything carrying an accreditation or ownership problem. A cheap program cannot leapfrog a university by scoring well, because it never enters the same list (which is the entire point of grouping first). That’s why Utah Valley sits below three programs that cost more, despite being the cheapest degree here by a wide margin.
One program, ASU, has no separable art history graduation count in federal data. We score it across the other three factors rather than recording a zero, since a zero would claim it graduates nobody, and that is not what the data says. We tested the alternatives, and this does not change the order of the rankings.
Curriculum of Online Art History Degrees
Online art history curricula look much like campus ones. You take survey courses covering large spans of time and geography, then upper-level courses on narrower subjects, then something that teaches you how the discipline builds an argument.
Lindenwood publishes its course list in full, and it’s a fair model for what to expect:
- Global surveys. A three-part sequence running from the rise of cities and empires, through colonial encounters, to the avant-garde.
- Period courses. Ancient, medieval and Baroque art, each taught as its own upper-level class.
- Electives that reach sideways. Asian cinema, the history of world cinema, early modern gender studies, and art theory and criticism.
- A capstone. Six credits, anchored by a research methods course in art history.
The other two fully online programs structure it differently:
- UW-Milwaukee runs 120 credits with 30 in the major, and says online students take the same courses in visual and material culture that the in-person program offers.
- Arizona State delivers art history as a concentration inside a Bachelor of Arts in Art, so expect general art coursework alongside the art history itself.
Where an online degree differs from a campus one is mostly delivery rather than content. Lindenwood builds a virtual reality headset into its degree for immersive remote learning. Treat that as a substitute for standing in a gallery (nobody is claiming it is the same thing), and ask whether the headset is a cost you carry. It also uses open educational resources in place of some textbooks, quietly taking a few hundred dollars off the real cost of the degree.
Art Databases for Online Art History Students
Online art history students get the same research databases as students on campus. The university library licenses them, you reach them with your student login from wherever you are, and for a subject that runs on high-resolution images that matters more than it sounds.
All three fully online programs provide them. UW-Milwaukee keeps a databases guide built specifically for art and art history research, listing Artstor, Oxford Art Online (which cross-searches Grove Art Online and the Oxford Companion to Western Art), JSTOR, and Project MUSE at 350 journals and more than 98,000 ebooks. Lindenwood and Arizona State carry Artstor and JSTOR through their own libraries.
One detail to know before you go comparing library lists. Artstor’s collections now sit inside JSTOR, so a program listing only JSTOR may still give you the full image archive, curated from museums and archives worldwide and cleared for use in coursework. What none of this replaces is standing in front of the object. That’s the next section.
Limitations of Online Art History Degrees
Online programs are far less likely to offer the in-person experiences that campus art history students often get. That’s the honest summary, and it’s worth seeing what those experiences actually look like before you decide the trade is fine.
- Museum internships for course credit, run by the department. Georgia State students earn three credits for roughly 120 hours of work, with a departmental coordinator who advises on finding a placement and then approves it. Georgetown runs a museum internship course at 10 to 12 hours a week, supervised by a curator, with a final project the department compares to an upper-level research paper.
- Living with original art. Oberlin’s Allen Memorial Art Museum has run an Art Rental program since 1940, where students rent an original work for a semester for $5 and hang it in their room. There is no online equivalent of that.
- Travel built into coursework. Virginia Tech art history students went to Washington DC to study works in galleries and museums and to meet alumni working in the field.
- Handling objects and campus collections. Programs built around a teaching museum let students work with real pieces, help mount exhibitions, and sit near conservation labs.
Lindenwood is the exception worth naming. It encourages its online students into internships and points to real placements at the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Nelson-Atkins, the Missouri History Museum and the Campbell House Museum, and it builds a capstone around research methods. So an online program can route you toward this work. What it can’t do is hand you a museum on your own campus.
None of this makes an online degree a bad idea. It makes it a trade. You give up proximity to objects, and you gain the ability to keep your job, stay where you live, and finish a degree you would otherwise never start. Decide whether that trade works for you, and if you go online, be deliberate about finding a local museum, historical society or gallery to volunteer with.
Cheapest Online Art History Degrees
The cheapest online art history degree is Utah Valley University’s B.A. in Art History, at $34,200 for the full degree. That figure comes from a flat $285 per credit that UVU charges online students living outside Utah. Second cheapest is the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s B.A. in Art History at $47,400, and UW-Milwaukee charges that to every online student regardless of what state they live in.
Cost is already 20% of our ranking, so the order above isn’t blind to price. If cost is your first priority rather than one factor among four, this table sorts the same five programs by what the whole degree runs.
| Rank by cost | School | Program | Delivery | Total cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Utah Valley University | B.A. in Art History | Hybrid | $34,200 |
| 2 | University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee | B.A. in Art History | Online | $47,400 |
| 3 | Lindenwood University | B.A. in Art History and Visual Culture | Online | $63,000 |
| 4 | Arizona State University | Online B.A. in Art, Art History Concentration | Online | $76,012 |
| 5 | Portland State University | B.A. or B.S. in Art History | Hybrid | $144,996 |
Every figure is the online or non-resident rate. That’s the number that applies to you wherever you live. A few distinctions worth knowing:
- UW-Milwaukee’s $47,400 is what everyone pays. The school states it as the online program cost regardless of residency, so there’s no non-resident premium to worry about.
- Utah Valley’s figure is $285 a credit for fully online non-residents across 120 credits.
- Portland State’s is four years of non-resident tuition at $36,249 a year, because PSU prices this as a campus degree. An Oregon resident pays far less.
- ASU’s assumes its own calculator’s 3.3-year timeline. Take longer and you’ll pay more.
- These are tuition figures. Fees, books and any technology charges sit on top, though Lindenwood’s use of open educational resources trims the book line.
Accreditations of Online Art History Degrees
Accreditation is the one box you should genuinely check, and for an art history degree it comes down to a single question. Does a recognized regional accreditor stand behind the university? That’s what makes your credits transfer, your degree count with employers and graduate schools, and federal financial aid flow.
All five ranked programs pass that test:
- University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, B.A. in Art History: Higher Learning Commission (HLC), plus National Association of Schools of Art and Design (NASAD) accreditation covering the art history degree itself.
- Lindenwood University, B.A. in Art History and Visual Culture: Higher Learning Commission (HLC).
- Arizona State University, online B.A. in Art with an art history concentration: Higher Learning Commission (HLC).
- Portland State University, B.A. or B.S. in Art History: Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities (NWCCU).
- Utah Valley University, B.A. in Art History: Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities (NWCCU).
Here’s what a red flag looks like. Academy of Art University offers an online art history degree and we left it off the ranking. It’s accredited by the WASC Senior College and University Commission (WSCUC), but the university’s own accreditation page states that its accreditation is currently on warning. A warning is an active sanction, and while it does not invalidate anyone’s degree, it is exactly the kind of thing you want to know before you enroll rather than after. The school is also for-profit, and we do not rank for-profit institutions ahead of public and non-profit ones.
There’s a second and quieter flag. Watch for a school accredited by a national body instead of a regional one. Newlane University is accredited by the Distance Education Accrediting Commission (DEAC). That body is federally recognized, but Newlane doesn’t appear in the federal IPEDS database at all, so no completion, outcome or aid data exists for it. That is not a scam, and at $1,500 the price is real. It’s simply a different kind of thing from a state university degree, and you should know which one you’re buying.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do Online Art History Degrees Need NASAD Accreditation?
No, online art history degrees do not need NASAD accreditation. The National Association of Schools of Art and Design (NASAD) accredits art and design units. That makes it the right question for a studio art or graphic design degree. Art history is an academic discipline that usually sits in a college of liberal arts, so most art history programs fall outside NASAD’s remit, and its absence tells you nothing about quality. Regional accreditation is the test that matters. One program here does carry it: UW-Milwaukee, whose NASAD listing names art history among its accredited bachelor’s degrees. Treat it as a bonus. Nobody should rule out a program for lacking it.
Will My Diploma Say the Degree Was Earned Online?
Usually not, though it’s a fair question to ask each school directly. Arizona State states plainly that its diplomas don’t specify whether you earned the degree online or in person, and most universities that run parallel campus and online versions of a degree take the same approach. The transcript may show the delivery mode, so ask about both documents if it matters to you.
Can You Study Art History Online at Master’s Level?
Yes, but the field is even narrower than at bachelor’s level. Lindenwood runs an online master’s in art history and visual culture, and Academy of Art lists a master’s available online and on campus. Most art history master’s programs remain campus-based, partly because that is where object study and language work get serious (the language expectation alone tends to sharpen at graduate level).
Are Online Art History Degrees Respected by Employers?
An accredited online degree from a state university carries the same weight as the campus version, and diplomas generally don’t distinguish between them. What employers in museums and galleries look for is experience, and that’s where an online student has to be more deliberate. Seek out the internship, volunteer at a local institution, and build the portfolio of practical work a campus program might have handed you.
Schools with Online Bachelor's in Art History Degrees
4 Schools Found
Arizona
Arizona State University
Tempe, Arizona
California
Academy of Art University
San Francisco, California
Online Bachelor's in Art History
Missouri
Lindenwood University
Saint Charles, Missouri
Online Bachelor's in Art History
Wisconsin
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Milwaukee, Wisconsin