What Does a College Application for Musical Theatre & Theatre Actually Look Like?

When people picture the college application season, they usually picture the Common App, maybe an essay, a few recommendation letters, and a submit button. For our Teen Cohort seniors, that's just the beginning.

I Hope I Get It

This year, our 14 seniors who've finalized their college lists applied to 179 schools combined, an average of nearly 13 schools per student, with one student applying to as many as 22. And every one of those applications requires its own audition.

For a theatre program, submitting a transcript isn't enough. Most schools require a prescreen: a set of self-taped monologues, songs, and dance clips, each filmed to that specific school's exact specs (full body shot here, waist-up there, a different song era for every cut). Add up what our students are filming this fall and the number climbs past 60 individual audition videos, on top of the essays, resumes, and letters of recommendation every other applicant needs too.

Money Makes the World Go Round

Students pay an application fee for the academic application, and then an additional arts application fee for the prescreen audition videos. Application and arts fees alone cost over $12,000 for our seniors. That's before a single tuition dollar is even discussed.

Defying Gravity

Here's where the largest issue comes to light: some of these programs are as hard to get into as the Ivy League, or harder. University of Michigan accepted 4.6% of applicants last year. NYU's Tisch musical theatre program accepts around 7-9%. Northwestern's theatre program: 7%. Carnegie Mellon's musical theatre BFA: 11%. These aren't outliers on our students' lists. They're typical.

This is what we mean when we say the road into this field is steep, expensive, and often invisible to people outside it. It takes real training, real mentorship, and real financial support to help a talented student navigate a process this demanding. That's exactly what Downstage Arts exists to provide, and we do it for free.

You'll Never Walk Alone

Every audition video, every application fee, every hour of coaching a student needs to walk into their audition prepared and confident, we provide for free. We can only keep doing that because people like you believe these students are worth investing in.

• $75 covers one student's application fee to one school.

• $250 covers the cost of filming and editing a full set of prescreen videos.

• $500 helps fund a season of one-on-one audition coaching for a student who couldn't otherwise afford it.

These students are doing everything right. They are training after school, filming until midnight to hit deadline after deadline, and walking into rooms with acceptance rates as low as the Ivy League's.

What they need now is you.

Will you make a gift today to help a Downstage Arts student get through this season? Donate now, or become a sustaining member of the Drama Club, our monthly giving community, so no talented student ever has to sit this process out because of what it costs.

Every single dollar gets a student one step closer to the stage they've been working toward their whole life. Thank you for being part of that with us.

With so much gratitude,

Lindsay Cummings