The school list makes a big difference. I don’t think my daughter was in comfortable re-use essay mode until she was at least 6 applications in. All but 1 of her schools cared about academics and the rest of her profile as an applicant and not just about her audition. (And maybe U Arts cared about that too. I forget actually.) There is also the inevitable “why this school” question to answer as well and while at a high level, you can rely on whatever filter you used to decide which schools belong on your list in the first place, customizing a stronger answer takes time. It was a grind to get through 11 or 12. I don’t think either of my kids would have been willing to crank out 20 applications and I didn’t want to pay for them. Both had EA acceptances at schools they would have been happy at which does make it easier to resist scope creep.
Also, many of the schools required separate honor program essays and applications and/or scholarship essays and applications. Some of those extras required extra recommendations too. The 7 she applied to all came with a lot of extra work. But with academic acceptances, honor acceptances and large scholarship offers coming in, so far it was worth it! Now to be accepted artistically!
Perhaps one reason I am so astonished by the idea of applying for 20 schools is that I remember how much time my D put in on everything that went into applying for 12. Now granted- 10/12 of the schools were academically competitive - so they had additional essays, personal statements etc - which are an important part of academic admission to those types of schools - we didn’t feel like she could cut/past those. Since I teach HS- I have been working with kids applying to schools for years. (which gave me a false sense of security before D’s application year- when I found out I understood academic admissions but had a LOT to learn to get on top of the artistic side). One thing I have noticed is that competitive admissions schools like specific, personal essays - they want to know that you are interested in THEM. Plus- D was invited by several schools to apply for competitive scholarships, which required MORE essays- and are also hard to do cut/paste style. Besides, it seems rude - someone is offering you the potential for tens of thousands of $$ and you can’t even write an original essay?
My d applied to several schools that are very academically competitive, and was academic admitted with merit scholarships that totaled in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, including:
TCU - rated Very Difficult for admission by College Data
Illinois Wesleyan - Very Difficult
Penn State - Very Difficult
Plus Elon, Baylor, Florida State, Indiana - all top 100 schools that are close to “Very Difficult” by College Data.
They all asked pretty much the same essay prompts or prompts that could be answered by relatively minor adjustments to her "standard’ essay material. As I recall, she was also invited to enter the Honors Program at every school that had one. My conclusion, despite all the rhetoric we received beforehand from various college readiness presentations, was that essays were not nearly as big a deal as grades and especially test scores (unless you are applying to a relative handful of schools in the top 30 or so - HYPS, etc.).
At highly competitive colleges, the essays do matter. Most applicants have the required “stats” to be admitted and so all the other pieces set applicants apart. At such schools, stats just get you on the pile to be considered, but don’t get you admitted by themselves.
Also, the essay prompts of “Why X college (or program)?” need to be tailored specifically to each school and if you can swap the name of the school in this particular essay prompt, the essay really is not effective at all.
Also, schools that have additional essays (such as in the supplements), would not bother to ask for extra essays if they did not matter.
Schools like Florida State, Penn State, and Indiana, are state universities which tend to be more stats driven as the criteria for admission. But in more selective schools and in many private colleges, things beyond the stats matter and they use holistic admissions.
It is possible to tailor essays for each school without starting from scratch for each one. You can thoughtfully and carefully reuse some parts of an essay written for one school as part of an essay for another. This does help reduce essay writing time. But even if you cut/paste, there is still considerable time and effort spent to craft an essay for that school. If you feel your existing essay material does not address the question posed, by all means draft an all new response. But do not feel badly if you want to use some portions of something you’ve already written. If it makes sense, that is just good time and stress management on your part. Do make sure for each essay written, you are putting forth the best response possible whether you are re-using material from a previous essay or starting anew.
I certainly agree that there are overlaps in required essays among applications. When I work with students, I come up with the least amount of essays that they have to write. Yes, some can be tweaked for various prompts or various lengths depending on the requirements. The “Why I want to attend X College” must be tailored to a school, however, and cannot be reused. Even so, with a lot of applications, and if they are to selective schools that have additional essays, it can still be a lot of essays to write.
I think a well crafted college list is more crucial than buying more lottery tickets.
I’m just making the point that applying to lots of MT schools is not necessarily a huge deal for all students, especially considering that among the top 50 or so MT programs there are very, very few where academic admission is highly selective and stats do not dominate. I think that for a very large majority of the programs listed at the top of this forum, stats dominate the admissions process.
Each student needs to follow whatever path through auditions works for them, and if applying to 20 programs (or even more in some cases) works for them, then that’s what they should do. Same for auditioning for only a handful or programs (or even less). If that’s what you feel comfortable with, you should go for it.
From my point of view, the problems with a limited list of schools is:
(1) It can be very hard for many students and parents to get a truly objective viewpoint on their competitiveness within the process. Even if you get top professional help, I know of many examples of nationally-known experts who “got it wrong” when predicting outcomes for various students. Heck, my d got over-estimated predictions from two former MT program heads from nationally prominent programs.
(2) There are so many variables in the selection process, many of them totally subjective, that make it extremely difficult to predict or estimate outcomes, even for extremely talented and well-prepared students. Some students will be “typed out” the minute they walk in the door, some students will pick the one song or monologue that irritates the wrong person on the panel, some students (who look fantastic otherwise) just don’t show well in the college audition room (“game day nerves” - this happens more than one might think, just look at what happens in athletics), sometimes a student happens to make an unfortunate series of subtle-but-crucial errors at exactly the wrong time in a series of auditions, sometimes through quirk of fate a student may end up being “the last one cut” at a series of colleges, etc. Because the top 50 or so programs repeatedly say that they have so many great students to choose from, then the obvious conclusion would be that through the subjectivity inherent in this type of situation, some element of randomness exists, and therefore the laws of probability hold in the selection process (more auditions = better odds).
However, sometimes a limited list of schools works very well. To each his or her own.
My d was just not interested in any of the possibilities for “safety” schools, or even “safety-ish” schools. She was only truly interested in an audition-based BFA/BM MT program that met her expectations. And some of those expectations were difficult for me to fully assess, For better or worse, I think she formed most of her opinions of various programs by how they treated her and interacted with her during the audition (including the sign-in process, chatting with current students working the auditions, the potential future classmates who were auditioning alongside her, the way the faculty gave any group presentations, the questions that they had for her, the level of organization of the auditions, etc.).
I think her focus on the audition process itself was reflective of her experience at working auditions for several years at her PA HS. She had been part of an excellent program with a very well-organized and fairly objective theatre audtions/admission process and expected the same of any school that she would attend. Her high school’s audition process was rigorous but also tried to ensure that every participant had a positive audition experience and learned about the school and its students, while being artistically and academically evaluated.
Hence, she was very interested in applying to and auditioning for lots of programs. The academic and application process did not seem overly-onerous to her, but it is certainly something that she would never want to repeat.
Here is a quote from Matthew Edwards at one of the Shenandoah auditions last year to a room full of students and parents (as I remember it):
@Ems dad- as always, you make excellent points. And in thinking about them, something occurred to that I had not thought of. For a program where the audition is everything- essays etc probably don’t matter. She could have typed out some nice song lyrics for her CMU essay- wouldn’t have mattered a bit. But the majority of the schools on her list had separate academic and artistic admissions, and were very academically selective. And for those- as others have pointed out- essays may matter a great deal. (How else do you differentiate between kids who are ALL have 4.0+ gpas, etc) So knowing how the schools on your list make the decision is key. CMU is a crazy tough academic admit for most majors- but not in theater dept. it just depends
I’ve concluded that MT is one of the most annoying college admissions processes of all. The entire process is one big lottery / crap shoot. I wonder if my D will stick with her decision to go to college for it as senior year looms. Stay tuned lol
My S applied to 16, passed all the pre-screens but one (still so curious about that one, but we will never know) and one school s a non audition school (UCI.) We are gearing up for 14 auditions between 1/16 and 3/4: 7 in NY, 5 on campus and 2 in LA (we are from LA can’t make the LA unified to due to a conflict.) I would love to know what the average number of offers one gets when they apply to this many schools? Would we be lucky to expect one or two? Three or four? He’s already got four academic acceptances to date…
Re: essays. We were told from the chairman of the school my son attended that at the end of the audition cycle, if you were being considered for admission, they went back and reread your essays and that figured into the decision.
I think essays are important. And I think you should submit the best essay you can. But I also think it is possible that portions of an essay you write for one school could be equally appropriate for another school. So if you can save yourself some time and stress by re-using the parts that make sense, by all means feel free to do so. Do not feel like you have to write 15 - 20 different, original works. That would drive anyone crazy! If you have a strong essay and it conveys what you want to say for multiple schools, use it. Just make sure if it needs adjustments to edit accordingly. And by all means, make sure you have the correct school name, location, etc… in your essay. Nothing could be worse than sending an essay about why CMU is the perfect school for you to Michigan. That is the danger of copy and pasting. So proofread carefully!
@Dankadon, there is no “average” in this process. Too many confounding factors. For boys, how tall are they? Can they play a leading man? Can they play a straight role believably? Do they have muscles? Can they dance? Voice type? Ethnicity? Etc. Everyone is different. I know boys who applied to 20 programs and got into 1; I know boys who applied to 16 programs and got into 12. You cannot predict. My D, who is a petite legit soprano, applied to 16 BFA programs, passed all prescreens but one, got accepted to 5 MT programs, WL at 3, offered a BA slot with an offer to re-audition for BFA MT in November at 1, and rejected from 6. But those stats won’t help anyone, even other petite legit sopranos. B/c everything changes, year to year. And art is subjective. Just have a good mix of schools, shoot high and shoot low and shoot everywhere inbetween. 
Well, technically, you only need 1, right?
Yup! You only need one!!! 
Best advice is have your kids audition with confidence and tell them to be themselves. Everything else will fall into place.
What are a few less competitive BFA, BA MT programs to consider? (all of them are competitive I reakuze). I have a friend back home who is only applying to the handful of very competitive name schools having never been through the process before. I just don’t want to see her disappointed and could maybe help by suggesting other amazing programs than the obvious.