One of the most common (and worthwhile) pieces of advice given to BFA applicants is to have a couple of non-audition back-up or “safety” schools. I thought it would be nice to the next group of applicants for this year’s group to share what schools were their favorite non-audition schools. “Safety” obviously depends upon a student’s statistics but no school that accepts less than 50% of the applicants can be considered a safety. So what schools did your BFA applicant apply to for academic admission and do you think they would have been happy there?
My daughter had a couple of requirements for her back-up non-audition schools and they were the same as her requirements for the BFA schools: In or near a big city, large, diverse, admits smart kids and has pre-professional training. She chose to apply to Temple and Rutgers for BA programs.
Rutgers allows applicants to apply to multiple colleges so you can apply to their BFA and BA degree at the same time. BA Theater students can sign up for any of Mason-Gross classes which are open to non-majors. Mason-Gross has an amazing reputation and my D loved her audition (not admitted to MG, though). We ended up not visiting Rutgers so I can’t give an admitted student’s perspective.
Temple has an audition-in BFA program as well as a BA program. My D didn’t audition for the BFA as they don’t do our local Unifieds so she only applied BA admission. The huge thing for us was Temple allows the BA Theater students to audition for the BFA program during their freshman year. They also have several “performance BA” tracks that allow the BA students to get more pre-professional training, both Acting and MT, while pursuing a BA. We visited Temple on an accepted students day and loved the program – the overall energy was great, the facilities were nice, teachers were lovely, students appeared to be very happy and their list of yearly productions was impressive. I think D would have been happy to have chosen Temple.