Washington, D.C.—The Broadcast Education Association (BEA) has announced the first annual rankings of schools based on the creative achievement of their students.
The rankings are based on the results from the BEA Festival of Media Arts. In the last five years alone, nearly 6,000 student creative works were submitted from BEA’s more than 300 member institutions around the globe for BEA’s extensive juried process.
Schools and students can submit their creative content in multiple media categories including Audio, Documentary, Film & Video, Interactive Multimedia & Emerging Technologies, News, Scriptwriting, and Sports. Student creative work goes through a rigorous blind-juried process that includes multiple evaluations by both academic and professional experts from cross the country.
Standards for Festival winners are quite high, the BEA said. On average, only the top 20% of entries are even considered for awards. These finalists are then judged for five levels of awards: First Place, Second Place, Third Place, Award of Excellence and the special honor of being Best of Festival. The rankings take into account both the quantity and quality of student works. For instance, Best of Festival winners are given a higher weight than Awards of Excellence.
Each school’s student achievements are then calculated and ranked for each of the seven competition categories. Additionally, there is an Overall Ranking based on a combined achievement across the multiple media creative disciplines, and specifically in this case, combined across all Festival competitions. Newer categories without five years of results were not considered for this year’s rankings. While the BEA honors outstanding achievements of both faculty and students, the rankings focus solely on student accomplishments.
In the “2022 BEA Festival School Rankings,” 170 schools are represented with student winners. The statistics are compiled and confirmed by the BEA Festival Advisory Committee, which is made up of past Festival Chairs and Creative Directors.
Based on that methodology, the 2022 top 10 winning overall programs were:
Rank School
1. Arizona State University
2. University of Oklahoma
3. Missouri State University
4. Huntington University
5. Syracuse University
6. Elon University
7. Ball State University
8. University of Florida
9. Rowan University
10. University of Southern California
The full rankings, as well as rankings for individual categories such as documentaries, are available here.
