The creative achievement of college students worldwide are being ranked thanks to a new classification system by the Broadcast Education Association (BEA).
Founded on the results from the BEA Festival of Arts, an international media competition focused on student and faculty creative endeavors, these rankings tally the efforts of more than 300 BEA member institutions around the world.
Rather than simply evaluating an academic media program from a school, the new BEA rankings consider the creative outcomes of students in multiple media categories including audio, documentary, film and video, interactive media and emerging technologies, news scriptwriting and sports. While BEA has been evaluating student works for more than 30 years, these new rankings are based on student successes over the past five years.
As part of the ranking process, creative work is evaluated through a blind-juried process that involves multiple evaluations by academic and professional experts. Finalists are then considered for five levels of awards: First Place, Second Place, Third Place, Award of Excellence and Best of Festival.
According to the association, each school’s student achievements are calculated and ranked for each of the competition categories, including an Overall Ranking based on a combined achievement across multiple creative media disciplines.
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This year, 170 schools were represented with student winners. The top programs in audio for the year 2022 include Goshen College, a private liberal arts college in Indiana; Missouri State University, a public university in Springfield, Mo.; and Rowan University in Glassboro, N.J.
Top programs in the news category include Arizona State University, University of Southern California and the University of Oklahoma.
Many of those schools are found again in the association’s overall program winners including Arizona State University, University of Oklahoma and Missouri State University. International schools made the list as well, including the America University of Cairo, which was ranked as top documentary program and represents students from more than 50 countries.