Class of 2020 (sharing, venting, etc)

College Majors Musical Theater Major
781

Regarding odds of admission on an overall basis, here is some simple math:

  1. Take the 57 or so programs posted at the top of this forum plus another 3 to make an even 60 (Alabama, Belmont, Utah, for example) and assume each program receives 500 applications for MT auditions per year (some more, some less). That results in a total of 30,000 applications submitted.
  2. If each applicant submits an average of 10 audition requests (some more, some less), then 30,000 divided by 10 results in a **Total Applicant Pool size of 3,000 students**. This correlates favorably with a more detailed estimate that I did a while back using a different basis: http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/17289152#Comment_17289152
  3. Using data from various posts, the average number of students admitted to each program is around 14. Multiply 14 students per program times 60 programs and you get 840 slots.
  4. Divide 840 slots by 3,000 students and you get **overall odds of around 28 percent**.

This is just a very basic estimate. Some caveats immediately come to mind:

a. There are definitely more women auditioning than men and there are probably more slots available overall for guys (many programs admit more guys than dolls). The odds for girls have to be worse than guys. If the ratios are 60-40 girls/guys for applications and 55-45 for slots in favor of guys, then the odds for girls drop to 21 percent and rise to 38 percent for guys. This just a speculative example.

b. If the average number of applications is less than 10, than the audition pool size would be larger. If the average number of auditions is 8 per student, then the pool size rises to close to 4,000 and the odds fall off to around 20 percent.

c. As mentioned in previous posts in this thread, since yields are usually less than 100 percent, there are generally more offers of acceptance than actual admissions. This would potentially seem to raise the odds, however, since talented students usually receive more than one offer, the odds may not be appreciably affected by the fact that there are more acceptances than slots.

Here is a link to the post mentioned by @ParachuteBoy earlier in this thread where I postulated about how many programs you should audition for given various estimates of odds of admission: http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/musical-theater-major/1243010-how-many-programs-should-you-audition-for-a-freakonomics-approach.html#latest