@rebjam London, wow! My child would love that, in theory. I’m not sure I would though, lol (nor would she really stand being that far from home).
You used the word ‘poor’ to describe grades. I’m continually bothered by the fact that people see anything less than ‘perfect’ as ‘poor’. I can’t imagine you really feel your son is a poor student, correct (with 'above average ACT)? I don’t see mine in that light either. The reality is, her arts grades bring up her GPA significantly (she takes 3 periods a day, and they are weighed as regular classes, with arguably equal rigor; one can only hope this is a plus!). It’s just a gripe I have about this whole process.
If you want a place where talent trumps academics, then look at
conservatory programs, because they won’t be expecting non-theatre courses, or
programs with lower academic bars
It’s really a matter of going through the usual US News or College Board stats for SATs, GPA, etc. For example, my daughter applied to 11 schools (some audition and some not, some performance and some not) and I think the academic rigor of those schools would have been ranked something like this:
Connecticut College (non-audition, non-performance)
2, Holy Cross (non-audition, non-performance)
NYU (audition, performance)
Emerson (audition, performance)
Wagner (audition, performance)
Pace (audition, performance)
Marymount Manhattan (audition, performance)
Brooklyn College (non-audition, non-performance)
Suffolk University (non-audition, non-performance)
CUNY in Harlem (non-audition, non-performance)
She was accepted into numbers 3,5 (but into the non-performance major),6,7,8,9,10. The lower ones also had audition-based majors but those were specifically her safety schools, and you can’t really have a safety school that only accepts 14 audition majors per year. Thus why she applied to the non-audition majors.
Conservatory programs like the Hartt School or Boston Conservatory will surely have talent trumping academics, so if your child is a B student or better then I would give those a shot. And heck, Julliard doesn’t recommend, nor does it require, SAT scores or a particular GPA.
You may already know that the Carnegie Mellon U. Acting BFA requires an audition, but possibly you don’t know that the audition very heavily weights the decision for acceptance to that program. My daughter was stressing over the essay and I called them to ask if there were still audition slots left and there were, but they said to tell my D to submit the application asap and that the audition counts about 85% of the decision.
CMU is a long-shot since they have so many incredibly talented applicants each year, but you have to be in it to win it, right? (BTW, my D did was not accepted, as we expected.)