And UMass Amherst is a BA program, not a BFA program.
OCU (Oklahoma City University) has some wonderful degrees such as the BFA in Design and Production in the School of Theatre. They do some neat projects. Recently The Oklahoma City University School of Theatre’s lighting design students presented their projects on the SkyDance Bridge downtown. The projects were paired with original soundtracks by the Bass School of Music’s composition students. It was the final projects for students in the upper-level lighting course titled “Museum, Fashion, and Special Event Lighting Design.” The class explores the transferable skills that students learn in the course of study in theatrical lighting design. And one of our costuming students just won a national award at the Kennedy Center Honors in Washington DC.
If you are interested more in arts admin they also have a B.S. degree in Entertainment Business where you can specialize in areas such as Event Planning, Entertainment Pre-Law, Talent Management, or Entertainment Enterprise. This degree is housed in the Ann Lacy School of Dance.
I agree that a lot of schools offer this. My D is studying theatre (performance, not tech) at Northern Kentucky University. But they offer a variety of theatre tech degrees. They also offer Japanese. They have study abroad options, but I’m not sure if there is a semester-long option for theatre. The school is about 16-17,000 students, which I’d consider medium sized. But you can assess whether that fits your criteria.
One of the heads of the Northern Kentucky program stressed several times that study abroad programs are highly supported (even financially) and encouraged. They have many different programs of different durations, even for theatre!
If your child wants to do a BFA in tech theater chances are they are going to have very little time for other classes. One option is to do a BA in theater at a school that also offers a BFA in technical theater if they allow the BA students to take the BFA classes (possible examples are Shenandoah or Otterbein). That way the student has extra time or flexibility in their schedule. Also, some schools offer only a BA in technical theater that is pretty intense but still allows for some other classes (e.g., Fordham, Pace, MMA). Or they could do the five year plan.
We found that most of the programs we looked at for my son did not allow study abroad. Those that did–Rutgers, Webster, and Ithaca. You’ll have to check on the availability of Japanese.
You could add Emerson and DePaul to that list. DePaul only sends one person per program abroad–you have to apply I think. Emerson has a castle in the Netherlands where kids can go during sophomore year to do some core humanities requirements. (Emerson probably doesn’t have Japanese though.) My D wants to study Latin, but it is not offered at Emerson, so she is looking at doing it some other way if she goes there.
It’s also a good idea to see what varieties of study abroad are available. Most BFA programs have a difficult time fitting in a semester abroad, because they have a pretty structured sequence of courses whether in Design/Tech, Acting, or Musical Theatre. However, there may be opportunities for a summer session abroad, or for an experience over Christmas Break, or courses that are primarily on campus but which take the spring break or 2 weeks after the end of the semester to visit London or Milan. In short: there are lots of ways that study abroad can be done, and any given school may offer one or many of them.