The CollegeBoard.org website has an excellent college search tool. To begin, we used that to input a lot of the factors mentioned above (rural/urban, type of school, location, diversity, study abroad, etc). Then it allows you to select majors available to narrow choices. My daughter wants an intensive BFA acting program, but she also wants the availability of a film school and a playwriting/screenwriting department. With the College Board tool we were able to narrow and then look the schools that had those things. You can even select how important things are to you so they weight them differently when showing you schools.
Once we had around 20 schools we then did the blind curriculum test that has been mentioned here on CC in the past. I searched each school’s website to find the specific theatre/drama BFA curriculum, printed each one, eliminating all identifying information, and gave them to my daughter. She went through and made notes on all of them and we made our final list from that.