Oh I found NU audition info!
https://www.music.northwestern.edu/admission/undergraduate/auditions
Really interesting about Michigan vs. NU. Does anyone know what kind of merit aid Michigan gives out? Might be worth adding to the list if there’s a chance for significant aid. Otherwise he’ll add it to the list for grad school. 
I actually think Michigan would be awesome for grad school @akapiratequeen ! I just found out one of my kid’s music teacher was there for a MM. NU seriously gave the most intimidating and least welcoming music tour we’ve had. My kid still likes it though, everyone else we met there was very down to earth, welcoming and great. I just noticed yesterday that it looked like @GoForth’s S did well with merit at Michigan on the merit thread? At Michigan’s presentation they said both not to be intimidated by sticker price and that they evaluate you academically before you are invited to audition and that there is no minimum test score and it varies in SMDT. In contrast to NU that said right out loud their average music student had an ACT score of like 32 and the music school has no power over academic admissions. LOL.
I just noticed Michigan doesn’t require a prescreen for vocalists which seems crazy. I’m a bit stunned by that. Prescreens at the U of MN but not the U of Mich? This process makes no sense to me!
I can offer a single data point on Michigan merit aid and NU test scores. D was admitted to both. She got varying amounts of merit-only scholarships from token to significant across her admits. Zero from UMich (we were OOS and didn’t qualify for need-based). That said, my impression is that merit aid everywhere is very unpredictable year to year, candidate to candidate. Depends not only on talent but institutional budget and institutional need for your instrument/voice part/area for that year. Male 18 year old singers also seem to be more typically sought after than females in VP (supply/demand) so you never know.
As far as NU goes, it’s true they seek students they feel will handle the fairly rigorous academic load well. A similar policy was also explicitly stated at Rice Shepard. We did hear on a visit that there’s a bit more leeway with test scores in the ED round at NU, which is a moot point for this year. The catch there is that the audition needs to be very strong to get in ED, and they don’t defer, so no second bite at the apple in the spring.
Good luck!
@MusakParent I think the only prescreens we needed to hear back on were for Miami, NEC and New School. Miami was after Christmas, that week after I’m fairly certain and New School followed that in early January. NEC was the very last in mid January which was annoying for travel plans. Go look at the prescreen thread from last year. The dates of notification are all there. That was amazingly helpful to me last year looking at the year before. It’s pretty much spot on with what you can expect for notification. I will also add that I recall one kid not getting a notification about passing prescreens but got an email about audition dates so if you haven’t heard when everyone else has, email admissions.
Look at the date Mezzo’sMama posted the new info and that’s around the date we kids were notified of passing prescreens.
http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/music-major/2028502-2018-pre-screen-thread-p2.html
Oh @SpartanDrew maybe you or other prior Frost EA applicants know what EA at UMiami is all about. I find it odd that there is prescreening for EA but not for RD? Do music students actually get not invited to audition in Miami based on that prescreen? Anyone have insight into that EA process there?
That link is super helpful! Thanks so much for digging that up, I have a much better sense of timing.
No EA and RD both require prescreens. If you look at that thread you will see that EA Miami applicants were notified in early December of passing prescreens. RD applicants were notified late December. And yes music students definitely are passed over on prescreens there. It is a small, excellent and highly competitive music school.
The only real advantage to EA in music there is if your kid is off the charts academically as was the case for @vistajay S if I recall. Or am I thinking of @BearHouse. Yikes I can’t remember lol. Those in the top top percent of the EA applicants were invited to a special scholarship weekend or something but still had to audition for the music school.
In any case, many kids who applied EA were given a “deferred admission” to RD but passed prescreens and ultimately got in. D sent in her prescreens and had the app completed long before the Nov 1 due date but she was nowhere near anything academically that would suggest she apply EA and thus applied RD. I can say this, there is ZERO chance she would have been admitted to Miami on her academics alone. It was 100% her audition that got her in.
I love seeing the lists as they come together. I hope my son will be ready for some of these bigger name schools for grad school. He started lessons a little late, started taking them seriously a little later than that and decided on music school in March 2018. I kind of feel like he doesn’t belong on this thread, but there’s no “remedial” music class of 2023, haha.
Here’s my son’s check-in:
Double Bass (classical), performance, B.M.
7 schools, 6 live auditions, one by video (no pre-screens)
Safety - one school has a non-audition B.A. as a backup (I don’t think he even knows this)
Match (?) - two in-state publics - depends on number of spots open. He has an idea of where he stands in-state.
Reach - Three OOS publics (one has a B.A. with a chance to re-audition for B.M.)
Super reach - One OOS public, one private, both probably too expensive even with academic merit
Academically, I’d say 6 safeties and one match, which should help with the financial part for some the OOS schools. The kid is good at multiple choice tests.
@MusakParent , I suspect Frost uses the EA prescreen just for Miami’s Presidential Scholarship Weekend invites. LAst year there were 4 music applicants who were admitted to the general university (but not Frost) via EA, and all 4 were also invited to the Presidential Scholarship Weekend (which also happened to be on one of the Frost audition weekends). S18 was admitted EA to Miami, attended the Presidential Weekend and auditioned, then received a formal admit to Frost about 2-3 weeks after the audition. But it was evident at the audition that they had already decided to admit him to Frost, by the panel’s comments.
“…it was evident at the audition that they had already decided to admit him to Frost, by the panel’s comments.”
@vistajay and others, was it your experience in general that schools “tipped their hand” to your students at all during the auditions? It would be great to have a clue before March!
@akapiratequeen, several of D’s schools “tipped their hand” to let us know she would be admitted (twice actually during audition weekend, and a few times via email within a couple of days/weeks after the live audition). So, it does happen. BUT it is NOT official, and you should absolutely NOT count on such a “hand tipping”. Also, this “hand tipping” is generally really frowned upon within the industry, and Professors can get in a lot of trouble for it. So… One program actually sent us an official letter regarding admission and how much merit aid was being held for D long before their results were due to come out (the letter came from a college administrator, and didn’t look like a normal acceptance letter, which came later)-but they were a less known program, and they were seriously courting D. Your S can expect to start receiving a few encouraging and personal emails after his auditions; they are sooo welcome in the dark days post auditions, lol!
@eh1234 , you and your S absolutely belong on this thread!!! GO, @eh1234 's S!!!
No not at all at Miami/Frost. Vistajay’s experience was very unusual because his son is off the charts academically and won that very very elite Presidential scholarship. I’d for as well as we knew the head of jazz voice (visited numerous times and she studied under D’s former vocal coach so we had a great connection and frequent communication) and D had also met previously with and communicated with the head of the CAM program, during her audition the JV peeps were stone-faced, said nothing and wrote tons of notes. No comments afterward, nothing. In her CAM audition, she did get a lot of positive feedback from Rey Sanchez who heads the program and had met her before and heard her music. But aside from that nothing.
Same with NEC and New school. No tips of hand at all. So I wouldn’t expect anything like that in most places but you never know. Oh and I’m pretty sure @GoForth S did have a big tip of hand at one or more of his schools…he might comment on that. Could vary from instrument to instrument and school to school though.
Other than Frost, only other “hand tipping” was at Loyola-NO, but that was because his private voice teacher was on the audition panel, and the audition was a formality.
OK, it does look like Frost only prescreens EA VP applicants but not RD applicants. Which again seems nuts, don’t they get so many auditioning!? It does look like they do prescreen a bunch of other areas for RD.
My kid is an academic high flyer stat wise which is part of the reason I wanted to get academic EA apps where possible. I forgot about the Miami deferral EA thing. Interesting. Is it still possible to get substantial merit at Frost without getting invited to scholarship weekend? Since he’s homeschooled, it’s hard to know how that’s going to fly. Some schools are very welcoming and some are not. And my kid has a CC transcript so he’s not really homeschooling like most people imagine. I actually discouraged him from applying to Thornton based on their less than warm homeschool vibe. NU is not super warm either but he’s going to try there.
And LOL @eh1234 my kid started piano at 5, voice at 12 and has perfect pitch and I still totally feel like a poser on this thread. The more the merrier!
Definitely @eh1234 – I think one of the big issues is few of us know how the students compare on the college/national level. So my precious snowflake may knock it out of the park in suburban NJ but who knows how many players in CA and Chicago are waiting to kick his butt? :)>-
@MusakParent EA at Miami/Frost is all about the academic scholarships. There are various levels of scholarship aside from the Presidential scholarship. It was all outlined very clearly on their website last year. You must apply EA to be considered for top scholarships but there are other scholarships that everyone is considered for EA and/or RD.
Maybe you should email to inquire about the prescreens. Everyone had to submit a prescreen last year. I would find it hard to believe that some don’t have to submit a prescreen.
@eh1234 I always felt like my DD was the underdog among the crowd last year. You absolutely deserve to be here!
Ok thanks diglass. We did the research on this a while ago for Frost and I knew it could be advantageous to get in EA with a strong academic application, but I couldn’t remember exactly the process. I did read back up on today now.
My kid did submit a prescreen with his EA app. But on the website it says ...
Prescreening
Priority deadline is November 1st for Early Action and December 1st for Regular Decision
Required for ALL Early Action applicants
Required for Regular Decision applicants who play/sing: contemporary/CAM, jazz, flute, keyboard, tuba, viola, and violin
So to me it looks like it is not required of RD vocal performance applicants? But we have one in anyway for EA so it otherwise shouldn’t matter to us. I am getting ahead of myself speculating about auditioning there and end game. Guess we’ll see how EA plays out.
@MusakParent , Miami gives a lot of scholarship money. Lots of kids with 32-35 ACTs received $22,000-$30,000 per year, even without a Presidential weekend invite. Presidential is full tuition, and they give 100 of those. If your kiddo is going to be a NMF, they can do even better. Of course, with a full cost of about $70,000, $22,000 off is still pricey. Frost gives its own music merit awards as well, which typically stack on top of academic merit.
@MusakParent everyone has to submit prescreens for Frost regardless of EA or RD. EA applicants have to submit them by 11/1 and RD by 12/1.