This is the wrong question. It’s mainly up to you to make yourself a good artist, not the school. Plus I don’t think you should spend a lot of money thinking it’s going to make you a great success. You can’t buy success. You have to earn it yourself through your own blood sweat and tears. You have to be really careful who you take art classes from. In colleges, there are a lot of modernist art teachers who don’t teach you any skills but just tell you to be creative. Don’t waste your money and time on them. They’re worthless. Finding the best teachers is a lot more important than looking for the “best schools.” Instead of spending a ton of money on what you think is the “best school,” you should spend a lot of time practicing drawing & painting and learning new things. If you can find some highly skilled & experienced illustrators to take classes from, that would be great. There used to be some good illustrators teaching classes in my area and they weren’t associated with any colleges. I’d rather go to something like that than a typical college class. Also there are clubs that meet up to have life drawing sessions. You chip in a little money and you get to sit & draw the nude models. Also see if you can find some community college classes taught by competent, traditional artists. Investigate the teachers before you take any classes from them. See what kind of art they do and what they believe in. Buy some good art instruction books. That’s how I learned painting, because the painting teacher I had in college was a joke. There are some great self taught artists. I certainly wouldn’t go to Yale just because it has a prestigious name and costs a lot of money. Check out the art that the teachers and students have done. If the art sucks, then they’re worthless. The Art Renewal Center web site has some recommended art schools / ateliers. I think you’d be better off going to one of those than a college. But the thing I don’t like about the living artists on ARC is that their figure paintings are very stiff and unimaginative. So you would also need to learn how to draw more imaginative, artistic, interesting, emotional figure paintings.

The best art program is you spending all your time practicing art every day.

First, if ya wanna become a representational artist, focus
there, period.
In the ‘Apple, be two old and well-established schools:
The Art Students’ League and the National Academy
of Design.
The ‘League’s run and directed by students’, so their sel-
ection of classes as poor as the students can be, but they
do have a decent array of teachers.
Ya can do well there, if you select the right teachers.
While the Academy not run by students, it too has that
uneven array of teaching talent; one can fare well there,
if they choose correctly.
As ever, it all on you.
Like Artiste, I concur, the Art Renewal Center lists a
number of ateliers which might appeal to ya.
You need look and make your own decision, though.
r

You need an atelier, not RISD, Parsons, Pratt etc. The latter are much more concept art schools. The former is rigid training from life.
Check the ARC for ateliers – most are in Italy, France, USA or UK.

Look at this article:

http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php/160487-Realism-vs-construction(a-guide-to-choosing-the-right-art-education)

That article lists only a fraction of the possible ateliers you could check out, but gives a good overview of the two main approaches to the study of figurative drawing.

Then check out the ateliers listed on the ARC site, as mentioned by another response to your query. Here’s the link to that:

http://www.artrenewal.org/pages/ateliers.php

You could also consider taking workshops from teachers before you commit to a 3 + year program at an atelier.

As for self-study, the Charles Bargue book is excellent. There are also courses of study available based on the Charles Bargue book.

Good luck!

Sadly, most of the established art schools in the UK have largely written off the skills as ‘old hat’ and gone down the route of conceptual art, installations and the rest of it. To make matters worse, many of them have been subsumed into their local universities and so have become more academic than arty, with the tutors too busy doing their ‘research’ (which plays a big part in determining their organisation’s funding). You won’t get much tuition or individual attention at any of those nowadays.

If you’re thinking about the UK, there are quite a few atelier-type organisations in London and the other big cities but you should certainly investigate an independent art school like Heatherley’s in Chelsea http://www.heatherleys.org/%5B/URL%5D. I’ve been studying drawing there (part-time). They focus on portraiture, figurative painting, printmaking, illustration and sculpture and have done since 1845. They’ve had some eminent alumni: Millais, Sickert, Dante Gabriel Rosetti, etc. Definitely worth a look.