In recent years, art education in colleges and universities has been more and more emphasized by the state and education departments, and has been comprehensively promoted and developed. The study builds the evaluation index system of art education development and assesses the development of art education in a university in order to identify its realistic dilemma. On this basis, the dung beetle algorithm is used to optimize the random forest algorithm to construct a decision tree assessment model of art education development. Through comparison experiments, the prediction accuracy and stability of the DBO-RF model are confirmed, and the deviation of its assessment results from the real value is below 4%, and the RMSE (12.247), MAE (9.133), and MSE (178.829) are lower than that of the comparison method, and the EV (0.721) and R² (0.719) are higher than that of the comparison method, which is applicable to a certain extent. The long-term and overall development of art education in colleges and universities can be promoted by establishing art education mechanisms, strengthening art practice activities, establishing resource sharing channels and developing scientific systems.