If you’re looking to get into video game design, you may find yourself skipping over the typical universities that are going to throw you through the loop for 4 years and you’re going to come up $35,000 in debt and it will feel as if you haven’t learned a thing!  Yes, college can be funny like that sometimes.

If you’re going to go into design, many experts will recommend that you get into a school that specializes in the field that you want to get into.  Today, I wanted to showcase some of the best video game design schools in the nation.

Whether you want to design characters, a game plot, or work for a major company such as EA, here are a few of the schools that you should highly consider, to receive the best education possible.

#1 Rochester Institute of Technology: RIT is based in Rochester, NY.  They offer a fantastic Film/Video/Animation design program that is well recognized throughout the industry.

#2 Rensselear Polytechnic Institute: Located in Troy, NY, RPI is ranked as one of the Nations’ top game design schools.  You can equip your skills with everything from design to leadership.

#3 Worcester Polytechnic Institute: This four year program will integrate artistic and technical skills.  You will focus primarily on design, virtual environments, and more.  WPI was nominated as one of the top 8 schools in the USA.

#4 University of Southern California: Throuthout  many publications that I have looked at, USC was ranked #1 for their design program.

#5 Drexel University: Get into 3D video games, as well as learn how to produce computer video games with Drexel’s new video game based courses.  Drexel has fallen into many top 5 lists, when it comes to video game design.

#6 Becker College: The last one of the list is Becker College, located in Worcester, MA.  Gain your Bachelor’s degree here in Design / Interactive Entertainment.  Here you’re going to prepare yourself for a career in development.

This is only a slice of the colleges out there that are offering video game programs.   As the industry gets bigger, you’re going to find that more and more schools are going to offer it.  If you want to find more schools, I highly recommend you check out the Princeton Review’s Top 50 schools for game design.