<p>Also, look at the acceptance threads . The same people get in everywhere .</p>
<p>@Jkellynh17 but the model if everyone did audition for 40 schools sort of accounts for that because though there are the same people getting in everywhere or at least in multiple places, they can only take one seat. The empty seat goes to the next person. The kids who get in everywhere only have a direct impact (seat wise) on the school that they choose to attend and zero impact on those they reject. </p>
<p>I don’t think it is quite fair to call the “4% acceptance” a myth. It would be more accurate to say that there are 2 different measures being discussed. The acceptance rate for any particular school is in that 2-10% rate mentioned earlier. If they audition 400 people and only accept 20, that is a 5% acceptance (ignoring the gender factors). That is a perfectly valid number for getting into that particular school. However, if you are talking about a particular person’s chance of getting into “some” MT school (and not any particular school), then the 25+% numbers come into play and is the more meaningful number. It really makes a difference in what you are trying to measure. </p>
<p>And wouldn’t there be a geographic component too? D only applied to schools in East and Midwest…and I am sure there are others who focused on others areas, but it applications seem east coast heavy…</p>
<p>@halflokum excellent point, darn it!! It is close to as hard as it looks. Feels a little like that Seinfeld episode where they discover the frozen yogurt really isn’t fat free.</p>
<p>@evilqueen hahahahaa!!! I LOVE that analogy. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. But I get where you were going with it and I still think the “all is not lost” message is relevant. </p>
<p>At one of the schools where my son was accepted, I asked the head of the program what they saw in my son that lead them to pick him. The answer? He was full of energy and they loved that he was goofy! Can’t learn that in a class! Prepare the best you can, have a thoughtful list of schools and be yourself because the process is a crapshoot is so many ways.</p>
<p>Some of these posts caused me to wonder, “How big is the audition pool for the 40-50 most popular programs?” If there are 2,500 in the pool, as previously postulated, and they do an average of 10 auditions for the 40 or so most popular programs, that means that the average number of applicants for the most popular programs is 625. With several/many schools quoting 1,000 or more applicants, that 625 average looks low. For every school that has 1,000 applicants, some other school in the top 40 can only have 250, or there must be more than 2,500 applicants in the pool (or the majority of applicants are doing more than 10 auditions each for those schools). </p>
<p>This begs some questions:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>What is the distribution of applicant counts across the top 40-50 programs?</p></li>
<li><p>How many auditions on average does each student do within the 40-50 most popular programs? Is it really 10?</p></li>
<li><p>Is the distribution of applicants really concentrated in 40-50 schools?</p></li>
</ol>
<p>I decided to see what the available CC data would indicate without waiting for a giant list of possibly suspicious origin to be accumulated ad-hoc (for example, some schools quote numbers based on the total number of students that auditioned at regional cattle call auditions that they attend, pushing the number well above 2,000 when the number of acutal applicants is much less). I would rather put my faith in extrapolations based on anecdotal information (smile).</p>
<p>Looking at the available information in the “Final Decisions: Background” thread for the past three years yielded the following data:</p>
<ul>
<li>72 students posted results</li>
<li>82 audition-based programs were listed</li>
<li>90% of the auditions listed were for the top 42 programs, 10% of the auditions were for the remaining 40 programs</li>
<li>Applicants auditioned an average of 9 times each for the top 42 programs</li>
</ul>
<p>So, this data lines up nicely with an estimate of 40-50 most popular schools, but the average number of auditions within that group is 9, not 10 (interesting…). The distribution of data looks like this:</p>
<p>47% auditioned for schools 1-5
35% auditioned for schools 6-10
29% auditioned for schools 11-15
23% auditioned for schools 16-20
17% auditioned for schools 21-25
13% auditioned for schools 26-30
11% auditioned for schools 31-35
6% auditioned for schools 36-42</p>
<p>This data fits very well to a typical exponential curve, which you would expect for population data of this type. The distribution of schools also had all the “usual suspects” at or near the top (the top 2 schools in audition counts are CCM and CMU, for example). You can easily argue that this is not enough data to draw conclusions from, but the data seems to track very well against accepted wisdom.</p>
<p>Using the distribution of data above, if the audition pool size is 2,500, then the number auditioning for programs would be:</p>
<p>1175 on average audition for schools 1-5
875 on average audition for schools 6-10
725 on average audition for schools 11-15
575 on average audition for schools 16-20
425 on average audition for schools 21-25
325 on average audition for schools 26-30
275 on average audition for schools 31-35
150 on average audition for schools 36-42</p>
<p>Hmmm, these numbers look low when you consider a possible distribution of schools across such a data range. For example, consider the following distribution of schools derived from the data collected in the Final Decisions:Background thread (for simplicity I grouped them in sets of 10):</p>
<p>1-10 (875-1175 average number of applicants)
CCM, CMU, PPU, Ithaca, Pace, Michigan, Texas State, Baldwin-Wallace, PSU, Boco</p>
<p>11-20 (575-725 average number of applicants)
Rider, Otterbein, Ball State, Elon, Hartt, Coastal Carolina, NYU, Syracuse, Emerson, Montclair</p>
<p>21-30 (325-575 average number of applicants)
U Arts, OCU, OU, Northern Colorado, Roosevelt, Shenandoah, Webster, FSU, Indiana, Ohio Northern</p>
<p>31-42 (150-325 average number of applicants)
Wagner, Marymount, TCU, Wright State, Miami, James Madison, Utah, Western Michigan, UCF, Alabama, Millikin, Viterbo</p>
<p>Whether or not the data is representative for particular schools is NOT important for this analysis, and, because of the relatively small amount of data, the accuracy of this distribution should be highly suspect - but it doesn’t matter for assessing the size of the audition pool. If you don’t agree with the schools listed or their position, create your own, however, you can’t radically alter the distribution of schools per bucket because it is a zero-sum game (2,500 applicants at 9 auditions per applicant). If you want to add a school not on the list, go ahead, but you have to drop one off the list to compensate; if you want to move a school up because you KNOW they have more applicants, then you have to move a school down. If the audition pool size is 2,500, then total of auditions can be no more than 22,500 = 2,500 students x 9 auditions/student.</p>
<p>The point is, however you arrange the schools, the numbers end up looking low and raise some issues:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Whichever schools end up in the bottom half have numbers that look lower than expected or quoted around CC.</p></li>
<li><p>There are schools which are likely to audition 150 or more that are not on the list: NYU Steinhardt, Central Michigan, UCLA, etc. If you include them, then the size of the pool has to go up.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Hence, an audition pool size of 2,500 for the top 40 or so programs looks low. Based on the data at hand, I think that the pool size is more likely to be 3,000-3,500 for the most popular 40-50 programs. I think the average number of auditions within the group of 40 or so most popular programs for non-CC’ers would be less than 9, for example (CCer’s are more likely to be better informed about the odds and probably audition more on average than non-CC’ers).</p>
<p>Does this really matter? If the pool size is above 3,000, isn’t this just “the Glee/Idol effect” in action? Isn’t the number of well-qualified applicants about the same as it always has been? To quote Tony from West Side Story, “Could be, … who knows?” I personally believe that the number of well-qualified applicants is increasing with increasing pool size, although perhaps not in a linearly increasing ratio.</p>
<p>The bad news is that the number of rejections for applicants within the most popular group of schools goes up with increasing audition pool size.</p>
<p>@emsdad, I will forever surrender to your mad data mining and analysis skills. I doubt anyone who came before nor after will touch you. </p>
<p>Your Tony quote pretty much sums it up. Just on a “look feel” basis, my gut says that the number of well-qualified applicants is increasing. I also think (gut feel) that it doesn’t make things more competitive than before. It makes things differently competitive than before. (See Glee factor thread.) The math on the number of rejections for applicants makes sense. My gut still says (and I cannot prove it but nor can anyone disprove it) that the competitiveness on a relative scale to how you compete hasn’t changed as much as people think. It’s only the height of bar that has changed but it’s not like that happened in a vacuum. Training programs developed to account for it and “if you build it… they will come.”</p>
<p>I think your daughter is up this year. It will be a great year to read the forum and your contributions.</p>
<p>^^^ Yup, it is time for us to “kick the tires and light the fires.” She starts the process in about a month at the International Thespian Festival.</p>
<p>@EmsDad I’m with @halflokum … In awe of your data extrapolating skillz. </p>
<p>@EmsDad, me three! Glad to be going through this with another numbers person :)</p>
<p>A valiant attempt to make sense of the senseless. There are so many unknowns, as you outlined above. Here’s another one – when schools reveal a number of students who applied, does that include people who applied but did not in fact audition? My son withdrew some applications halfway through, because he had already been accepted to a school he preferred to some others on the list, so he never auditioned for three out of the nine schools he had applied to. </p>
<p>At some point, you just have to let go of the numbers and try to be the one that gets through. The numbers are always going to be daunting, not just for college auditions but in-college auditions, regional auditions, professional auditions and everything else. As my S’s twitter profile says, “Don’t be the best. Be the only.” </p>
<p>WOW… EmsDad! Impressive! And something to think about 
</p>