As the only college in America that provides a four-year college-level degree combining training in the traditional trades with a liberal arts core curriculum, ACBA is unique.

If you want to learn how to lay a brick or weld metal, there are a lot of good trade schools around the country where you can do that. An ACBA degree, however, teaches you much more. Here you will not only learn the skills of your craft, you will also acquire the broad liberal arts foundation that allows you to design, to be a leader in your field, to understand not only how to do something, but to think critically within the context, science and history of your craft, to manage a business, to communicate effectively with clients, and to market your skills.

ACBA also offers an alternative to traditional trade apprenticeships by creating a curriculum for studying the building trades at the college level. Its core liberal arts courses are taught in a way that makes them applicable to the building trades. For example, rather than biology or astronomy, ACBA students study material science, the science of how building materials behave under such factors as rain, humidity, wind, stress, heat and cold. Business and leadership courses provide the basics of entrepreneurship. Art courses teach how to make your hand follow your brain’s directives.

Regardless of their craft specialization, ACBA students combine classroom instruction with group and individual work in the shop or studio during the school year and practice their skills in the real world during summer externships.