Any thoughts or insight to help with choosing between Rider and Montclair MT programs? This is for my son who would love a strong dance program and the best opportunity for employment after graduation. Thanks for any advice or insight.
Don’t think the program determines best opportunity for employment, but we have several people on this site who have kids at both programs. Hopefully they can chime in.
@CalMTmama, my daughter is a sophomore at Montclair. Applied to Rider but cancelled her audition there. Obviously we are biased toward Montclair but there are plenty of people who are happy with Rider, too. Feel free to PM me!
Rider’s dance program headed up by Robin Lewis is fantastic. All of the instructors my D has had so far have been wonderful. From observation (my D is a freshman MT), boys who are great dancers seem to have a VERY good shot of being cast multiple times from freshman year on. One of Rider’s current Juniors is on leave touring with Newsies.
The dance program is leveled so your S would audition when he gets on campus, then he will be placed in the correct level of ballet for the fall, reaudition later in the fall for spring jazz placement and reaudition in the spring for sophomore tap placement. Lots of levels in ballet and jazz so he can take classes for a number of years, variety of other dance classes as well (modern, tap, mt dance) so there is a lot of strong dance training throughout.
I know you specifically asked about dance but I will also through in that the vocal department and acting departments seem to be equally as strong. D is extremely happy with the training she is getting in all areas of MT. She is also on Riders BHP honors college so she is challenged with her non-MT classes and will be able to do a minor in Arts Administration (Rider actually encourages its MTs to have minors). I will admit that Rider itself is not that difficult to get into from a GPA/SAT perspective but the MT students on the whole seem to be very intelligent, a lot of them are in the Honors college as well as the MT program.
Hope that helps some CalMTmama. Feel free to PM me if you have any other questions. And btw, there are a lot of MT kids from Cali in my daughter’s class, some of her closest friends. I’m pretty sure they were all offered East Coast homes to stay in over the shorter Thanksgiving/spring breaks if they can’t make it home to the West Coast.