I’m a freshman in high school and already majorly stressed about colleges. Theatre is my passion and I honestly can’t see myself doing anything else so getting a BFA in theatre (probably mt) is my only option for college. I hear that all of the high profile MT schools on my list like NYU, Carnegie Mellon, U Mich, and Northwestern evaluate grades separately from your audition and are all very academically selective. I could take a lot of advanced classes at my school but honestly it would harm my talent and health so much I’m not sure if its worth it. I would rather take tons of dance, vocal, and acting classes while sleeping enough and working out than stress myself out over pre-ap and ap classes never making time for working on my art or keeping myself healthy. I need to know if its realistic that I could stand out in the auditions enough to get into these highly selective schools with only 1 or 2 ap classes and a few pre-ap classes every year. Could something like that happen or do i need to find a way to load up on highly stressful classes and have time for theatre classes? Its also worth noting that i’m diagnosed with depression and a panic disorder which makes me taking advanced classes very difficult despite my intelligence and capability to do well in them. Any advice would be appreciated!
@chinagrace First off, holy cow, WOW! that you are a Freshman and you’ve already begun and know what you’re looking for, AND found this forum! Kudos to you!!
I believe all the schools you mention focus on academics as well as talent, while many of the other MT schools, while still looking for good grades, focus more on talent. As for academics, I’d suggest you take classes that challenge you, but not to the point of it being unhealthy for you.
And my biggest piece of advice is to put together a list of schools that include not just the reach programs you mention, but plenty of others, and at least 2 safety schools. (Safety meaning they are non-audition artistically, except for maybe scholarship $, AND a safety academically AND financially). Once you’ve got that list, start researching like crazy and try to visit some colleges over the years bc you may not ‘really’ want what you think you want…type of campus, location, etc.
@chinagrace I think that anything is a possibility. That said, I also think you should consider if you want to go to one of those schools badly enough to stress out over a huge AP load for the next 3 years. The fact that they consider academics so highly also means that the academic classes once you get there are likely more challenging than the classes at other institutions. On those schools specifically, I will add that the word on CC is that CMU does not consider academics as stringently as the others. They go more off the audition. NYU is known for giving virtually no merit aid and costing somewhere near $70K per year so if you don’t qualify for need based aid, it’s one of the most expensive programs. U Mich and CMU are both known as lottery programs taking really small classes. I think CMU is 6 students and UMich is something like 18 (OK - let’s be real - most of the programs are getting to be lottery programs when they accept between 2-10% of auditioners,but the schools you noted are particularly known for small acceptance rates.). My personal opinion is that your health and happiness is more important. If you keep your grades up in regular classes, have an AP here or there that you feel comfortable with, and spend more time on your training, you will likely stand out more to the many many other great programs out there that base admission more on your audition than your academics. And you never know…you still might make it into those lottery programs that consider grades at 50% of the equation.
Be aware that there are other, very highly selective MT programs, arguably equivalent (or nearly equivalent) in terms of artistic competition for admission, training, and reputation to the ones you mentioned, where you certainly don’t need AP courses to be admitted, including: Baldwin-Wallace, Texas State, Ithaca, CCM, etc. Other excellent, well-known, highly competitive and highly selective programs where academics standards are distinctly lower than places like Northwestern and NYU include: Wright State, Coastal Carolina, Point Park, Hartt, Roosevelt, Shenandoah, Boco, Otterbein, Webster, etc. Schools somewhere in between from an academic perspective while also being very highly selective artistically would include: Elon, Emerson, Penn State, Syracuse, etc. At almost all of these places, your high school curriculum and grades are not going to factor very much, if at all, in your artistic evaluation for admission to their MT programs, although you will have to separately meet their minimum requirements for academic admission (however, I mean in no way to discourage pursuing a rigorous high school curriculum and good grades). By the way, I don’t think that you have to have AP credits to be admitted to CMU, Michigan, or NYU’s MT programs. Northwestern, on the other hand, requires a very rigorous high school curriculum with outstanding grades for admission to any program.
In fact, there are dozens of excellent MT programs, which are very competitive for artistic admission and provide arguably equivalent training and experience in Musical Theatre to the most well-known schools like Michigan and CMU, and you may find by your senior year that many of them are a better fit for you than the most well-known colleges. The 50+ programs listed at the top of this forum are a good place to start researching schools with solid MT programs, although there are many more good programs beyond those.
Many students pursuing admission to BFA MT programs apply and audition to at least 12-14 schools, and the wise ones include a broad mix of schools that include some that are not among the most widely known and highly competitive for artistic admission. A well-balanced list is a good way to avoid being shut-out of audition-based BFA MT programs.
A good place to start would be to read Mary Anna Dennard’s book, “I Got In - The Ultimate College Audition Guide For Acting And Musical Theater.” Its very easy to read and provides an excellent summary of the college audition process. It is available on Amazon.
My d, who had lots of AP credits and very good grades and test scores, chose to go to Western Michigan (generally not among the most widely-known MT programs, although they have a good reputation on Broadway) where she has received excellent training and experience in their MT program. As an example of some things to think about, you can read about her journey over the past four years here: http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/western-michigan-university-mt/1809907-why-my-d-chose-western-michigan-p1.html
ITA with @speezagmom - my D took the AP/honors classes she wanted and skipped the others. She opted out of taking Calculus as a senior despite dire warnings from her guidance counselor. She did what was right for her and her education and NYU accepted her anyway. 
She did get good grades, take a rigorous schedule and she had good scores but she balanced her workload with outside activities.
On your list of schools - and I hope that list gets bigger - only NU is purely academic. U Mich has a threshhold for applications and it’s not super high. CMU doesn’t consider academics at all and NYU is 50/50.
I say - embrace your education but don’t take such a heavy load that you can’t work on your triple threat, perform for fun and enjoy your years in high school. They go fast.
I would warn however, that NYU has gotten more and more academically competitive every year. The overall university acceptance rate has dropped significantly in just the last few years. It was 35% in 2012…27% in 2016… and 16% this year.
Just a comment on that @toowonderful - it’s true that NYU as a whole is getting more competitive for admissions and that’s primarily driven by the increase in number of applications - from 60,000 in 2015 to 84,000 in 2019 plus an healthy increase in their yield percentage. Those numbers may or may not correlate to Tisch. I don’t know that anyone would be able to say whether Tisch auditioned 40% more drama applicants this year than 4 years ago? They would have to have added a lot more audition dates if so. Similarly - acceptance yield goes up as a program gets more desirable and Tisch Drama has always been a top choice for a lot of applicants so I don’t know if yield figures have changed. With this year’s change in studio assignments, that could go either way. I am certainly not saying Tisch Drama is getting easier to get into … but I don’t know what we have any numbers that say it’s getting much harder either. If you have better concrete info than I do, I’d be interested!
@CaMom13 - I totally get what you are saying. BUT with academics being judged separately from the audition, and numbers of applications increasing, it seems to me that the academic aspect of the application process is going to get more important, and more competitive… and being sure to have sufficient academic rigor (per the OP) will be important. Not that you have to take EVERY AP class - my D also skipped AP Calc, but not having any - esp if the school offers them, could be a deal breaker
Every student is different and there are so many MT programs that have a wide range of academic requirements in addition to the artistic. Many of those have already been mentioned. My S knew as early as 7th or 8th grade that he wanted to pursue musical theater. And though he did well academically his first couple years in high school, he had a much more difficult time his final two years because his focus and interests were so much into theater. He did take a couple AP classes, but those may have been to the detriment of his GPA. We are pretty certain he was disqualified from a few programs without even an audition because of academics. But that’s okay because he likely would have struggled with the non-theater classes at those schools.
He is now completing his sophomore year at the University of Miami, a school which if you look at the average high school GPA and SAT scores we would have thought he would not have made the cut. But like some of the other programs out there, the MT program weighs the audition pretty heavily. As the program director said to us when we visited the school in 2017, he will not accept anyone into the program that he does not believe can handle the academics at Miami. He said he has only been wrong twice, and he assured us that he believed our S would do just fine. If I remember correctly, what he said was pretty close to “We promise the students that they will receive excellent training. We promise the parents that their student will graduate with a college degree.” I will add, though, that a higher GPA would have made Miami a tad less expensive since he would have qualified for some additional scholarship money, so that is one other thing to keep in mind.
As I said, every student needs to follow their own path. Only you can decide how much academic load you can take on during your next three years of high school. Just know that not every program out there weighs academics as heavily as others. Do keep an eye on the minimum academic requirements of each school, however. And if you are a 4.0 student who excels at AP classes, by all means go for it. But don’t feel you HAVE to take on that kind of load if that’s not your strength.
Good callout @UMiamiMTDad “a higher GPA would have made Miami a tad less expensive since he would have qualified for some additional scholarship money,” Many schools have scholarships if you have a certain level of academic success. Many are not very transparent about it, but it’s there. I could be wrong, but I don’t think that they look under the covers at what your curriculum was when awarding those scholarships that often come based off of your GPA and test score.
@speezamom - you are correct vis a vis scholarships. As a HS AP teacher - my students are constantly struggling between rigor/gpa. It can be quite a balancing act, and I have seen students stressing about taking courses they want (band/choir, electives etc) b/c they are not weighted, and will “hurt” their class ranking, or overall gpa. That makes me crazy - kids should get to take classes they WANT to take. But it all just another layer of the game. The highest gpa - which could come from taking less rigorous classes, might mean $$ at school A. But not taking the most rigorous classes could keep you out of school B. Again, based on the schools mentioned by the OP (specifically Northwestern and NYU) rigor would be an important piece of the puzzle
Getting a lower grade in an AP versus a regular class hurts a student’s unweighted GPA but only reduces his/her weighted GPA if the letter grade is more than one lower than she/he would have expected in the regular class. There are collateral effects to taking a more rigorous curriculum as well. Increased workload in advanced classes can impact the amount of time (and potentially the grades) allocated to other classes which, in turn, can impact time spent on MT training and performances.
In my daughter’s (current HS sophomore) situation, she did not take any honors classes her freshman year. We wanted to make sure she had a solid base GPA to work from before adding workload. She did very well last year (one B in French…why she chose that language is beyond me) so we had her take honors English her first semester this year and extended the honors program to history this semester. Based on the results so far she will take AP English and History in each of her final two years of HS. I think working her up to this point was more effective than hitting hard from the start freshman year and potentially digging a hole that can be hard to get out of.
If her academic performance stays at the level she is now, she should end up with weighted and unweighted GPAs right below and right above 4.0. Without (and maybe even with) stellar test scores, this most likely precludes her from Northwestern. And she and I can certainly live with that considering there is no guarantee you get into the MT program a year down the road at NW which could mean one year of very high tuition down the drain. I feel confident with solid test scores, she should be accepted academically everywhere else.
In other words, I would tend to start at a level that gives wiggle room to fit other commitments and if you excel academically, add more challenging classes going forward.
My D had the same concerns. For her the answer was dual enrollment, where you take your classes at a local college or community college for simultaneous high school and college credit. I don’t know if that’s an option where you live, but it might be something to look into.
There are pros and cons. I probably wouldn’t recommend dual enrollment over AP for someone trying for Ivy League, or an an ultra-competitive academic major. AP is more likely to transfer credits more widely, and the fact that it’s a nationwide standard means colleges know what to expect. With dual enrollment you need to be careful and go to a college or community college with a decent reputation, and spend some time looking at transfer equivalency guides for your most academically competitive schools to get an idea of the classes you should take. It puts a lot more responsibility on you to guide your curriculum. And some kids find it lonely being away from their high school, or aren’t ready for the level of independence college professors/courses expect. There can also be cost associated. For us tuition was free, but we paid fees and books amounting to about $200 a quarter.
The benefits for my daughter were huge though. A big one was flexibility in schedule. Rather than taking seven courses at any given time, she was taking three and that was full-time. She could choose her schedule, meaning if she wanted to go five days a week and start at 8 and be done by 11am, she could. If she only wanted to go to school on Tues/Thurs and have M, W, F off for theatre, work and training, she could make that happen too. She worked her schedule so that each quarter, she took one core class in a subject she felt strong in (language arts, for social science), one “killer” course in a subject where she tended to struggle (math or science), and course in another area that interested her (foreign language, music theory, etc). That balance helped her to never feel overwhelmed, and she was able to really improve in some areas she struggled and really challenge herself in subjects she loved. Because one quarter course equals a full years course at the high school, she would take nine courses over the school year, compared to the seven she would have taken in high school. This allowed her to account for the fact that colleges might deem dual enrollment slightly lower than AP, by taking more core classes, and thus upping her “rigor” that way. It also had the added bonus of making each course count a little less toward her cumulative GPA, so she could worry a little less when she had a really tough class (not that she didn’t give it full effort, just that it was less “if I fail, this will be the end of my academic career” kind of pressure). By the time she graduates she’ll have completed significantly more core classes than many of her local peers, and well over the recommended guidance for the colleges she applied to. Overall, while her homework was challenging, she found it more interesting, and by per volume of homework she had several hours less homework per week than her friends taking AP classes. Another huge benefit for her was that the transferability of her classes was largely based on her performance over the entire class (assuming she ensured it was a transferrable course), not on a single test. As a poor test-taker, AP could have been a disaster for her. The friends thing wasn’t an issue for her, because she was active in regional theatre and her friend network existed mainly outside of school anyway. Her boyfriend and best friend both attended different high schools, and she still got to go to dances and do all the high school things, just not at her school (which is admittedly different, but was not a big con for her).
When it came time for college admissions D applied to 18 schools. She ended up with 6 BFA admissions, and several BA re-directs. She got into 100% of the schools that give academic acceptance separately, including some of the more academically selective schools, and she passed UMich prescreen which means she met their academic standard. She got non-need based academic scholarships at 100% of her acceptances, and was invited into honors college at several schools. That’s with a 3.6 GPA (unweighted, many schools weight college credits taken at a college similar to AP credits), and a very mediocre ACT (again, poor test taker). Since the majority of her college coursework did transfer, she’ll be entering her BFA program as a freshman with 100% of her general education requirements already completed. She also has a lot more confidence in taking on college because she done a lot of the small tasks that can feel a little intimidating at first (registering for classes, buying supplies, professor office hours, tutoring centers, etc).
Again, this is not for everyone. But it was a lifesaver for D. She was able to do the ridiculous theatre schedule she wanted (often upwards of 40 hours a week, between training, theatre internships, rehearsals and shows), successfully complete high school (next month!) and still have some balance for friends and general high school fun.
The depression and panic disorder is a fully separate issue that I would encourage you to make any school you attend aware of. There are resources for that, and you should not face an academic disadvantage for it. My D is diagnosed with anxiety, and because she found a schedule and situation that worked for her, she did not need to access any of those resources. But if she had needed them, we wouldn’t have hesitated.
You are in a great place, because you are starting early, you know what’s important to you, and you have a goal. That is so far ahead of most kids. Now you just need to look at the options available in your school district and find something that will work for you. Don’t be afraid to ask for help at your school, and to make it known what you want to do. If someone is patronizing (because I think many of us have dealt at some point with patronizing attitudes about going into theatre at school), ask someone else and keep asking, till someone offers guidance. I wish you the best of luck!
@speezagmom @toowonderful We had the unfortunate problem that the guidance counselors at our high school were so overwhelmed that they were not able to adequately guide students in class selection. Our school had close to 1500 students with just two counselors (California has the second highest student-to-counselor ratio in the US). For his junior year, our S decided that he should take Math 3 STEM instead of the less rigorous Math 3 because “it would look better on the transcript.” He did not confer with us because we would have tried to steer him to regular Math 3 since he was a) not going to pursue a STEM major and b) had no intention to take pre-Calc the next year. I told him an A or B or Math 3 will look better than a C in Math 3 STEM. But teenagers know more than their parents, of course.
The one AP class we all wish he could have taken was AP US History, because he loves history. But only one section was offered and it was the same period as his Dramatic Arts class. There are definitely a few things we wish he had done differently with class selection in high school, but in the end I am convinced our kids end up where they were meant to be.
@BFAorBust Our high school did participate in the Middle College program at our community college, but our S wanted to stay at high school with his friends, and more importantly continue to participate in their plays and musicals. Of course, he could have done that at the college as well, but he’s very social and wanted to stay with his friends. It is a great option to consider, though, for anyone who has that option available.
@UMiamiMTDad - I teach AP US History … so I agree it’s the best one
I wanted to add that it’s worth noting that scholarship money isn’t an issue for me since my brother didn’t go to college so my parents managed to combine that money with the money they saved for me and i’ll have enough to pay for college even at a place like UMich. Also I’m fully aware that the highly selective schools aren’t the only good programs!
Hi @CaMom13 - just chiming in on CMU and academics… They do look at overall perfromance, and while the audition itself accounts for approximately 80% of the equation (this is why they spend so much time with viable prospects), the other 20% is grades, coursework and test scores. The classes there, even within the BFA majo,r are very academic in nature. 
Good to know @beachymom - from past years I had heard that if the faculty at CMU wants you - they get you, lol. And the audition folks last year didn’t say anything about academics being part of admissions criteria.
Another viewpoint:
You want to be in MT. Great!
Let us say you take easier classes so you can do more MT.
Let us say that you are not as good as you think you are.
What is your plan then?
What if you don’t want to do MT full time in the future? I know you are convinced right now you do!
My Daughter has wanted to be a doctor since 4th grade. She took all the pre-med prereqs in college, got to her second semester senior year and said “I don’t want my life to be that stressful for the next 8 years”.
Now she isn’t sure what she wants.
So give yourself the most options. The most options for colleges, for careers…
I would say that grades may not be as important as talent to acceptance to an MT program, but for scholarships they are the MOST important. There is just not a lot of talent scholarship money out there and the vast majority of scholarships are academic. While your parents may have been able to save money for college, I am willing to bet that they would rather spend less money than more. Get good grades