Privilege, Training, and How To Save Money

College Majors Musical Theater Major
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As I was reading the comments about going to Unifieds vs. going to on-campus auditions, I was thinking about how expensive this whole process is. It also reminded me of this article. In it Judi Dench talks about the wealth divide that’s keeping working-class actors from getting the training they need to compete in this very competitive world. She’s speaking of the UK, but it’s the same in America.

https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/sep/13/judi-dench-actors-held-back-by-wealth-divide-drama-school

Unifieds is a way to even the playing field a bit, but just a bit. I think it’s a shame that some programs insist that you audition on-campus; I think they’re losing the opportunity to accept kids that have important life stories to bring to those programs.

Some of you that have been on CC for a long time may remember an aspiring actor that was doing the whole college audition process on her own. She posted about staying at a hostel while at Unifieds, just so she could afford it. I’ve thought about her many times, and hope that she made her way into a great program, and is now a successfully working actor.

The costs of auditioning have sky-rocketed; between coaching, traveling, paying for tracks and accompanists, classes, application fees, etc. I really feel for those talented kids that are pushed out of the game before they even have a chance.

Some coaches offer scholarships, which is commendable, but I think we’re losing a lot of kids that just can’t afford to pay the game the way it has to be played.

So, in that vein, maybe it would be helpful to share how you saved money throughout this process.

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Great thread, @zebracocoa . This endeavor most certainly favors those who can afford private voice, lots of dance, outside of HS acting classes. The cost of college itself has gone up tremendously as well: Our D had schools that she simply could not add to her list, due to cost. There are lots of ways to save money on this journey: Accrue hotel points at one chain (Hilton & Marriott both have great rewards programs), “buddy up” and share hotel rooms with a peer. But honestly-If I had a younger kid pursuing MT-the number one price saver would be to KEEP YOUR GRADES UP. H & I kind of (totally) had our eye off the ball with D; because her (13 mos older) Irish twin was pursuing a D1 athletic “career”, and at the same time struggling with prescription drug addiction (we didn’t know,) Meanwhile, D was chugging along-doing whatever it took to earn straight As. I hate it for her-I hate that she was ignored and unheard: But I am in awe of her-that she earned straight As. Even in classes like Chem and Stat that were very difficult for her. She has received great scholarships. She can choose the program she wants-and we are looking at <20K a year-because of her academic #s. So, if money matters-study, study, study. And know that that’s how life is in a BFA. You’re not done when you limp home at 11 pm. That’s when you do your homework.

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@owensfolks I agree grades a totally matter and make a difference with scholarships.

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Good point @owensfolks Especially for schools that have merit money based on test scores and GPA combo.

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!. Agree - hotel points and airline points are super helpful. Start stockpiling them now! If you don’t already have a credit card you use that earns miles or other travel benefits, you may wish to consider switching to one that does. Another possibility is to stay with friends already at that school if doing on campus audition.

Also make use of free food at the hotels! Many have free breakfast. At Palmer House, we stayed on Executive Floor which had free breakfast and snacks at night as well as beverages and snacks throughout the day. We didn’t even go out to dinner except once while in Chicago!

We also brought or bought bottled waters and some snacks D liked. She didn’t like to eat a lot during auditions

  1. Definitely good grades help. Also,good test scores. Worth taking a prep class or do freelance prep online to get those scores up. They don't necessarily help admission but thy can greatly effect your cost.
  2. Audition attire - our D wore a $15 dress from Old Navy! Simple, pretty color. Was easy to move in, looked cute on her and most of all she liked it, felt good in it and was comfortable in it. In fact, we bought 2, because at that price we could!, so she always had one ready and clean in case something happened to the first. Don't feel like you have to spend a fortune on audition attire!
  3. There are lots of talented kids out there doing head shots for a fraction of what professionals charge. Look around your area and see who might be doing it or offering a head shot special. Especially if there is a theater program in your area, or theater groups - see who does good head shots and compare prices. Get it digitally so you can print as you go if you like. Or we used The Actors Photolab to print photos. You can find them online. They also had pre cut resume paper very inexpensive (you need 8 x 10, not the standard 8 1/2 x 11). They were quick and inexpensive.
  4. Unifieds (any location) can reduce number of places and days you need to travel/hotel/etc...Video submissions, although not preferred by most schools, do yield some results and might be an option for schools that aren't as high on your list. Not all schools accept videos but some will, particularly if you live far away. I've read recently on here where schools such as Tampa, Viterbo, NYU, OCU and others have all accepted students from video.
  5. Go ahead and make a list of what items you may need to purchase for audition season and go ahead and start buying a few things now so you don't have all those expenses all at once. There are plenty of audition threads on here that give lists, but some things I can think of include: audition attire, dance attire for dance calls, headshots, resumes, audition and dance shoes, hair accessories if needed, notebook for music cuts, purchase music and/or monologues, small bluetooth speaker to use in auditions that don't provide accompanist, I'm sure there is plenty more to add to this list, but you get the idea. Might not hurt as bad if you buy one or two things a month instead of everything all at once. We also had an emergency kit with things like needle and thread, stain remover pen, paper, pens and pencils, tape, hair elastics, bobby pins, hair spray, cough drops, pain reliever, stomach medicine, sinus medicine, personal steam inhaler, humidifier for room, -- you name it, we had it!
  6. In that same vein, one thing that caught us a bit off guard, although I don't know why, were all of the fees. There were school application fees, audition fees, and even extra fees to submit test scores. Some schools are more expensive than others (I think ours ranged from $35 - $180 or something like that - 5 years ago). If you have time, you may want to start an account specifically for some of these expenses. If you apply to 15 - 20 schools, and you average $50-$100 in fees per school, you are talking somewhere between $1000 - $2000 just in fees. Go ahead and save some $ now to help with those fees.
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Both applying to college and attending college is clearly more of a hardship for those of lower economic means.

I just want to point out, however, that the cost of applying to BFA in MT programs for my younger D cost no more than the cost of applying to regular college for my older D (applied a year apart from one another). We felt it was important to visit each school they applied to and both did that. MT D also auditioned on campus, but I would have visited the schools no matter what. A few campus auditions were back to back with others in the same general area (one trip). Did not invest in any particular audition attire…she chose outfits from her wardrobe. Didn’t need to buy specific dance attire as D took many dance classes and owned dance attire/shoes (both my kids did for that matter). Application and test score fees were similar. Both kids had costs associated with lessons and extracurricular endeavors. For headshots, we used the private photo session for senior portraits (something all seniors do at our high school) and used a headshot photographer and so used the photos both for portraits/yearbook and college auditions. Other D also had a photo session for her senior portraits but simply not a headshot photographer, but another private photo studio. MT was no more costly for us than all the other stuff they did along the way and in terms of applying to college.

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A thought on fees, if you visit or are in contact with schools junior year or during the summer, either by visit or email sometimes the admissions office will send you an email that waives the application fees. Also, I know many students who go the fees waived just by asking.

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A couple of thoughts.

  1. Make sure your kid REALLY researches the programs you're applying to. I have a procrastinator who built a list based off of cursory research and school reputation. We paid around $200 in fees to NYU only for him to make the wait-list and decline it immediately because he learned about the cost of the program and lack of merit money after the fact. Oh - and that audition caused us to travel to unifieds 2 days earlier than we would have had to otherwise costing extra hotel and meals money. BoCo wasn't as expensive as NYU in terms of fees, but after hearing more and more about the program from other students, he decided it just wasn't for him and bowed out of his audition. Another set of fees we could have skipped.
  2. Take a look at the thread on saving money at unifieds. There are helpful suggestions on there.
  3. Many have said this before, and we took this advice... wait til you have acceptances/WL notifications before you visit schools if they're not a day trip away. I know it can be a scheduling challenge, but if you live far from the schools you're looking at and you're applying to 10-20 schools, you can waste a lot of money visiting and falling in love with places that your child won't get accepted to.
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I actually didn’t get any sort of professional photos taken at all and I got accepted to three and a half (a half for a waitlist) great acting BFAs (ultimately what I decided to go for though I started out as an MT)! None of the schools cared. I was fine. We went to our local FedEx to print and cut everything-took forever, kind of a pain, but saved us a couple hundred $.
I did the vast majority of my auditions (all but four) at Chicago Unifieds. Living in Chicago, this saved us so so so SO much money because we did not have to pay for airfare or a hotel and we only paid for a meal and maybe a few coffees throughout the day.
Of the four on campus auditions, they were all Midwest (one was actually a Chicago school, which made life easy) so we drove to all of them.
Suggestions for making these trips cheaper
-LOOK AT ALL OF YOUR OPTIONS-be it lodging, transportation, food, ANYTHING. We saved so much money simply by going through everything that was available. For one school, our cheapest option was airbnb but for the other two the motels ended up being much cheaper. If we had just taken the first option, we wouldn’t have discovered the cheaper choices.
-get a credit card with airline points and USE IT! We are going to NY this weekend to visit one of my acceptances and our airfare was free because of the points we had accumulated on our southwest card!
-use public transportation! Not only is it easier is many big cities, but parking is incredibly expensive in most of them and cab fare adds up. NY and Chicago both have pretty good public transit so if you’re in one of those cities for auditions forgo the car and hop on the subway.

Hope this helps!

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My daughter did SETC auditions her junior year. The annual SETC convention was close enough we could drive. She received application waivers from about 13 schools for auditioning there. One had her fill out the applications right then, her junior year. Others continued with correspondence and sent the waivers through the mail. It was a great benefit. I would think there are others programs similar to SETC but this was the one we could drive to and accomplish.

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10 10 agree with @sabersunshine on benefits of attending SETC junior year. We received waivers for fees as well. Plus it’s another great way to see some schools and get info on them & potentially save money down the road by weeding out a couple.
And I think someone already mentioned if you visit a school junior year or whenever ask for an application fee waiver if you are thinking of applying. Sometimes they offer it but sometimes ya gotta ask

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Instead of buying an expensive photo portfolio for Senior Pictures – get new headshots instead! Headshots look just as nice as “senior pictures” in the school yearbook. Grandma and Grandpa like them fine. We found that we paid a lot less for new headshots then many people paid for senior pictures. And we bought the “rights” so that we could e-mail headshots and print more when needed.

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The process of applying to MT schools was WAY more expensive than the “regular college” applications. For one thing, with a strictly academic application, you have a much better idea of match and reach schools. With MT - no idea. There are plenty of ways to save a little money here and there, but overall, this is an arena for those who can afford it. Knowing all I know now, I would do things differently for my MT kid.

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@librarygirl8 I agree and always have said that the mt college process is so much more $$ then regular college apps. you don’t travel to audition for regular college admissions. You have the crazy amount of schools that you have to apply to plus send prescreens plus either afford the on campus travel or the travel to some schools & Unifieds. I mean yeah you visit regular schools for sure but not to audition and then again to confirm whether you want to attend . Plus MT admissions are different anyway because you have to try so hard to make the right decision when choosing a school because it’s so hard to transfer to another program later for MT.i mean schools won’t take the theatre specific credits etc. so then you have to start over.
Everyone likes to pretend it’s not a process for people with cash but let’s face it we all have sunk some serious money in the MT admissions process .
It’s truly Nutville!

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I can only speak from personal experience. Both my daughters, one vying for a BFA in MT and one applying to very selective colleges visited every school on their list. They also returned to verify where to attend (actually my non-MT daughter returned to her top three acceptances in April, whereas my MT returned for the fun of it to her top choice that she knew she was going to attend). I spent the same and did the same amount of visits (actually I think more for the non-MT D than for the MT D when it came to campus visits) and the admissions process overall. MT was not more money in our case.

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Well, it doesn’t seem like we saved any money during this endeavor, lol! But here are a few things we did that could have been more costly:

We live in the DFW area, so in addition using Mary Anna Dennard’s excellent coaching service, which I’m pretty sure made all the difference for D, it ended up being less expensive to pay for her coaching and go to Moonifieds than to go to all those individual schools. Knowing what I know now, I still would have paid for the coaching and Moonifieds, even if it wasn’t local, but in the end it allowed D to audition at more programs than we otherwise could have managed financially or logistically.

Chicago Unifieds - flights to Chicago from DFW are cheap and frequent (my son also is in school there, so bonus!).

We did this with S for music programs (which don’t have Unifieds or Moonifieds) last year and flew to six auditions -drove to three. Logistically I don’t see how we could have fit more in, and costwise it would have been painful to add more. I know it doesn’t feel like it but unified auditions are a huge saver in my opinion, based on doing individual trips with S last year. I also loved that D’s instrument is her voice. It’s much cheaper to check that on to a plane than it was to check my S’s upright bass!!!

We stayed at the Palmer House and the audition hotel for Moonifieds, neither of which were cheap. But it can definitely be done for less - we chose that so it would be easier for D to rest and freshen up. But we could have done AirBnb and saved a lot. We stayed at a fantastic Airbnb in Tampa - it was inexpensive and so much fun!

Spirit Airlines. I know everyone hates them. But they are cheap and if you take the time to understand their policies you can manage pretty well. D and I shared a single suitcase - the biggest suitcase you can check on. As a $9 Fare Club member one checked bag adds $21 to the cost each way. Still much cheaper than any other airline to Chicago or the NY area. If you understand their policies, you can do just fine.

THIS IS A BIG ONE: POD hotels in NYC. We stayed at POD Times Square for under $100 per night. There are two other POD hotels. Super deal.*

ETA: This was expensive! In some cases we tried to save money, in others we felt it was wise to spend. But it’s fair to acknowledge that if we didn’t have a reasonable income, this would not have been possible at all. It was thousands of dollars. We could have done it for less, but it still wouldn’t have been cheap.

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@BassTheatreMom Okay, now you have to tell us about your experience with POD hotels! I had never heard of them, so I have been googling . . . but tell us about your accommodations in NYC!

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Well, they are like little, but nice, dorm rooms. I stayed at one with S last year when he was doing music auditions - POD51 that time. This year D and I stayed at POD Times Square. We are going back for some final visits and may try POD39 just to cover them all.

They are tiny - bunk beds and a tiny bathroom built into the wall. It would be difficult for a very long stay, but for a couple of nights they are great. The little rooms are super clean and well appointed. Each bunk has it’s own tv with separate controls and place to plug in earbuds and your phone right next to you. There is pretty much no hanging space - so that’s tricky with audition clothes.

There are also some rooms that share community baths that are even less expensive.

They are geared to a younger crowd. When we got off the elevator at POD51, S said, “Hmmm. Smells like a concert.” Since he was in the middle of classical performance auditions, I had symphony orchestras in my head. It took me a beat to figure out what he meant, lol!

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Well @soozievt I will say you continue to be the outlier in this process… I know you went through it some time ago so perhaps things are a bit different and more expensive now?

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@theaterwork I think some who are commenting may not ALSO have a child who went through regular college admissions. I’m simply saying that your point about campus visits was exactly the same for my non-MT D and my MT D. We thought it was important to visit every college for both kids. And if they needed to decide in April, we supported revisits. So, the cost and effort was the same on that aspect. App fees…same. Score reports…same. Headshots…I explained we had headshots done to use for senior portraits for MT D and had a regular senior portrait photographer for non-MT D. Same. Actually my non-MT D had some SAT tutoring and my MT D did not (MT D took the SATs in tenth grade). No new or different attire needed for MT D. Both my kids had nice clothes. Specialized wear or shoes? Both kids had dance clothing and took dance and actually my non-MT kid had many specialized attire that was costly (ie., ski racing and other sports, plus dance attire). Lessons? Both kids had lessons/training/classes in each of their multiple areas of interest…same. Summer programs? Both kids went away every summer to programs of interest.

Is this expensive? Yes. But no matter a kid’s interest areas or types of colleges, many of the costs are similar.

Just to add: my non-MT daughter also went to four years of graduate school. My BFA in MT D basically already has a professional degree. So, my non-MT D cost WAYYYYYY more to educate than my MT D. For non-MT D, there were all the college visits to her graduate schools (not to mention she went through the graduate admissions process twice as she first went to one grad school and eventually went to another). There were the app fees for grad school. And after scholarships, there was the tuition and living expenses for four more years than MT D. :smiley: