I am a very strong student with a 4.2 cumulative GPA (so far). I want a school that will challenge me in the musical theatre field, as well as academically. I am particularly interested in places like New York, Boston, and California; however, I am open to the idea of any place that has a great program! I also would prefer a school that either isn’t crazy expensive, or that offers plenty of financial aid and scholarships. So far I have looked at schools such as UCLA, Tisch (NYU), Carnegie Mellon, University of Michigan…the list goes on and on. It is frustrating that most of these schools are so expensive. Does anybody have any suggestions or words of wisdom as I narrow down my college search? I am currently a junior in high school and will be doing campus tours this summer.
what is your home state?
California
You may also want to investigate Northwestern University, near Chicago. Very well respected Theatre program with strong MT emphasis available, coupled with very selective academics. Full tuition is expensive, but the schools is extremely well endowed, so they are among very few schools that can guarantee meeting 100% of demonstrated financial need for every admitted student.
Montclair State University is very inexpensive, offering in-state tuition to BFAs. It’s in New Jersey, but only 30 minutes to Manhattan and there’s a train station right on campus.
Molloy/CAP21 isn’t super-expensive, and offers a lot of merit aid.
As you proceed, make sure you ask what “guarantee meeting 100% of demonstrated financial need” actually means. It generally does not mean free money or grants. It means LOANS. The school will give you a LOAN to attend. My daughter applied and as accepted into CMU, Michigan and Peabody (for voice, not MT), and even though each website promised to meet financial need, she was offered loans. I believe Northwestern does the same. I recommend, once you have put together your wish-list of schools, you talk to admissions and ask this question: “what does it mean when you say you will meet financial need?”
I can’t speak for other schools, but at Northwestern virtually all of our need-based aid (we qualified during the years we had 2 kids enrolled) was in the form of scholarships and grants (free money), not loans. Plus they were very generous with grants for summer projects and travel. NU caps student loans at $5000/ year ($20k total). The years that we had no financial need they did offer loans to help meet our EFC, but we chose not to take them.
We did find that the state schools our S was admitted to offered far more loans than grants.
And of course if a school offers a financial package you don’t like you won’t have to attend, but you can’t know what they offer until you’re admitted.
^^^Agreed. Some schools that offer to meet 100% need indeed offer scholarships/grants in addition to loans in the package. For example, this was the case when my D attended Brown (in fact, right after she graduated, their policies would have given us even more money). With two kids in school, the grant portion per year was significant. I don’t think NYU meets full need, but even there, my kid got a substantial scholarship/grant as part of the FA package. We also had loans for both kids. But their packages had grants and loans, not just loans.
That’s great that Northwestern came though for you!
Ball State and Texas State are relatively low-cost options, though neither is an academic powerhouse.
Illinois Wesleyan has a strong program and is an academic school. We were told that academics are pretty heavily considered in admission on top of talent. It is an expensive school, but my D has received a huge scholarship offer from them.
It’s not in a major city, though, but the students seemed happy and busy!
CMU, Elon, Emerson, Jame Madison, Syracuse, Michigan and Penn State - all have higher academic standards - but some are quite pricey
I would suggest running the net price calculators on the websites for the schools that interest you. This will give you an idea if you would qualify for need based aid at a particular school. The schools define define demonstrated financial need, so having this information will help you figure out if schools could be affordable.
If you do not qualify for need based aid, merit/ talent aid is what you will be looking for. Some school… like University of Alabama… offer guaranteed merit aid for specific stats. Other schools have competitive merit/ talent aid.
Talk with your family about what they think they can afford for you for college, and share the information on need/ merit/ talent aid.
This will help you narrow down your list of schools.
@samantharae at Northwestern, GPA is only half the story. Northwestern also requires a SAT (or act) above a 2000 ++ to be competitive. Some other of the MT schools listed require a minimum 1650 SAT (Michigan). But many schools do not have a minimum. I see you are a new member and from California (which tends to be out of the loop esp if you don’t attend an arts high school): Grades and Scores are not really all that important for Most schools.
For 97% of the schools, Your Audition is THE most important factor in admission to a Musical Theatre BFA/BA/BM program. For most MT schools, grades and test scores are almost an afterthought – though may get you a good scholarship if coupled with good test scores. Having a 4.2 GPA means absolutely nothing in terms of admittance to an MT program. (with the exception of Northwestern and other nonaudition schools). I apologize if I have stated the obvious, but I would not want you to think getting admitted to a good BFA program is like getting admitted to the school, where if your stats exceed the average you are likely to be admitted. That’s not how it works.
At NYU and Michigan - which you mention in OP- a student has to be academically admitted as well as artistically, and those are competitive admits (your grades are great so far- and if your test scores are similar you will be in great shape). Tramsmom is correct that at a lot of schools the audition is prime (and sometimes only) criteria for admittance, but grades/scores can make the difference in whether or not you can afford to attend the school. (merit scholarships etc).
In the case of Michigan for example, one is not expected to have the grades and scores that other Michigan students have. I am sure it helps, but if you don’t wow them at the audition, your grades/scores are getting you nowhere. I would say: Good grades and test scores are a necessary but entirely insufficient condition to being admitted to Michigan. Your audition must be better than that of aprox. 780 applicants and/or you must have the right look (whatever that may be in a given year) sound, movement, personality, resume, skills, zodiac sign (hahah). No one truly knows what that is. They may not even know until they see it.
At NYU (and BU) the artistic and academic admits are complete separate. As I understand it, you have to pass academically AND artistically- and one will not see the other until after decisions are made- so you could “pass” audition and still be denied admission.
That may be true of those two schools and maybe a few others. But they are the exceptions to the rule, not the norm.
That is the best definition of what schools are looking for that I have seen. Despite some talk this week about casting one’s admitting class, several programs articulated specifically that they do not cast nor look for type. They are looking to admit students who have the best potential to professionally succeed. If these schools are really good at what they do - and overwhelmingly they are - I doubt they have any preconcieved notions of what they are looking for when a student walks through their door. But they do know when they see it. That darned “it” factor. I wish I could bottle it and sell it!
You are absolutely correct. But since it was a part of the OP - I thought it was worth mentioning. As with so many other parts of the process- academics can play a part of the choices being made as well. While my D was fully committed to the idea of a BFA program, she wanted to maintain academics as a part of her process - after all, she had put 12 years of work into that! So we did a LOT of research on programs at academically (as well as artistically) selective schools. Just another path…