SVA most commonly refers to one of two things: the School of Visual Arts, a well-known art and design college in New York City, or Shareholder Value Added, a financial metric used to measure corporate profitability. Which meaning applies depends on whether you’re researching colleges or corporate finance. Here’s what you need to know about both.
SVA as the School of Visual Arts
The School of Visual Arts is a private art and design college located in Manhattan, New York City. It offers undergraduate and graduate programs across disciplines like illustration, animation, graphic design, photography, film, fine arts, interior design, and more. SVA is widely regarded as one of the top art schools in the world, ranking #18 globally for art and design according to QS World University Rankings and #14 among U.S. graduate fine arts programs according to U.S. News & World Report.
The school is especially strong in illustration, animation, and graphic design. It has been ranked #1 for illustration programs in the U.S. by multiple ranking organizations, and #1 for 2D animation globally by The Rookies. The Hollywood Reporter includes SVA among America’s top animation schools, and Backstage lists it among the 30 best film schools in the country. The U.S. Department of State has recognized SVA as a top-producing institution of Fulbright students for the 2025-2026 cycle, which speaks to the caliber of work its students produce.
If you searched “what is SVA” because you’re considering applying or you saw it mentioned on a portfolio or resume, this is the institution people are referring to. It draws students who want careers in the creative industries, and its location in New York City gives students access to agencies, studios, galleries, and media companies during and after their studies.
SVA as Shareholder Value Added
In finance, SVA stands for Shareholder Value Added. It measures how much operating profit a company generates beyond what it costs to fund its operations. The idea is simple: a company that earns more than its cost of capital is creating value for shareholders, while one that earns less is destroying it.
How the Formula Works
The calculation is straightforward:
SVA = NOPAT − Cost of Capital
NOPAT stands for net operating profit after tax. It represents the profit a company earns from its core business operations after taxes, but before accounting for how the business is financed (debt payments, for example, are excluded). This makes NOPAT a cleaner measure of operational performance than net income, which can be skewed by financing decisions or one-time events like asset sales.
The cost of capital is the minimum return investors expect given the risk of their investment. It blends the cost of both debt (interest on loans) and equity (the return shareholders demand). If a company’s NOPAT is $50 million and its total cost of capital is $35 million, its SVA is $15 million, meaning the company created $15 million in value above what investors required.
Why Companies Use It
SVA is useful for comparing companies across different industries or capital structures. Because NOPAT strips out the tax savings that come from carrying debt and ignores extraordinary one-time items, it levels the playing field. A heavily leveraged company and a debt-free company can be evaluated side by side based purely on how well their operations perform relative to the capital tied up in the business.
Executives and analysts use SVA alongside similar metrics like Economic Value Added (EVA). Both start with NOPAT, but they differ in how they calculate the capital charge and what adjustments they make to accounting figures. EVA, developed by the consulting firm Stern Stewart, involves more detailed adjustments to published financial statements, such as replacing standard depreciation with economic depreciation or reclassifying advertising and R&D spending as capital investments rather than expenses. SVA, originally developed for corporate planning purposes, tends to focus more on cash flow-based analysis. In practice, both metrics aim to answer the same core question: is this company earning more than its cost of capital?
Other Meanings of SVA
You may also encounter SVA in the context of UK public procurement. The Social Value Act is a 2013 law that requires public bodies in the United Kingdom to consider broader social, economic, and environmental benefits when awarding government contracts. Under this law, social value carries a minimum weighting of 10% in bid evaluations for central government procurement. If you’re researching UK procurement requirements, searching for “Social Value Act” will get you more targeted results than “SVA.”