Your Kid's Dream School Is Probably Not Their Best School (And That's OK)
It’s not unusual for a child deciding to go down the MT path to have a dream school. It may be a dream because they’ve visited it and loved it, or spent time there during a summer program, or have seen their shows and socials, or maybe they just think “If I want to succeed, I have to get into [big name school here]”.
As a parent, the best thing you can do is to try to counter that kind of thinking. You may not be successful, but you should try! Here’s the unfortunate truth: the vast majority of applicants will not get into their dream program. Here’s why.
A typical well-regarded BFA Musical Theater program receives somewhere between 2,000 and 4,000 applicants in a season. They’re looking to build a cohort of 10 to 30 students. They might make 20 to 60 offers to account for students who choose elsewhere, but the number of kids who actually walk in the door is small. For context, that’s a lower acceptance rate than most Ivy League schools, for every program in this range, not just the handful of names everyone knows.
I know some of the CMU theater faculty through my wife’s studio, and they’ve been candid about this. They told us that in a typical season, they can easily identify 70 to 100 applicants who are genuinely capable of succeeding and thriving in their program. They make offers to around 20. So the question isn’t really whether your kid is good enough - in that scenario, a majority of the capable kids don’t get in. The question is which 20 of the 70 or 80 happened to be the right fit, on the right day, for the particular cohort that program was trying to build that year. Sometimes it comes down to something as arbitrary as the energy in the room on the day of the audition.
When the odds at any single school are somewhere between 1% and 7%, the statistically likely outcome of applying to a dream school is a rejection. That’s not a commentary on your kid’s talent. It’s just math, and it’s something you should try to explain to your child.
I tell this story in my talk because I think it lands differently coming from someone who’s been through it outside of the arts: in the early 90s, I applied to MIT, Caltech, and Stanford for undergraduate engineering. Got roundly rejected by all three. Ended up at USC, which in the early 90s was not the top-10 engineering program it is today. It was referred to as the “University of Second Choice” and it wasn’t entirely untrue back then. But at USC, I got opportunities I would never have gotten as a tiny fish in a gigantic pond at one of those other schools. I ended up building a career I’m proud of, starting and eventually selling a company, and doing work I genuinely love. None of that was blocked by the name on my diploma.
USC is now a top-10 engineering school (and also a great theater school!) But even if it hadn’t risen in the rankings, the outcome of my career wouldn’t have been meaningfully different, because I firmly believe that when it comes to colleges, success is 90% who you are and 10% where you are. If your kid is talented, hardworking, and genuinely committed, they will find a way to build a career from almost any solid program. The name opens some doors and closes others, but the work is the work regardless of where you do it.
During our process we visited a great, competitive program. Not necessarily a program that would be in a playbill top-10 list, but a wonderful program that has lots of graduates working professionally. During the visit, the faculty mentioned, almost in passing, that they had a transfer student coming in from Michigan. Michigan SMTD is one of the most celebrated MT programs in the country. This person had gotten into their dream school, gone, and then made the decision to leave. Because no matter how good a program looks from the outside, fit is personal, and your kid at 17 or 18 doesn’t actually have enough information to know what their dream program is. They only know what they think it is, based on reputation and what they’ve heard from others.
What you want is a school where they feel genuinely supported, where the faculty believe in them, where they’ll be challenged without being crushed, and where they’ll have real performance opportunities. That describes a lot of programs, including many that aren’t on the short list of names that dominate the conversation in Facebook groups.
My daughter also noticed something interesting as she got deeper into the season and got to know other kids going through the same process. She could see patterns in who was getting in where - not in a competitive way, but in a “I kind of understand why the two of us both got into that school” way. Auditioners are building cohorts, and there’s a personality and energy they’re looking for that goes beyond raw talent. A rejection from one program may have nothing to do with ability and everything to do with the particular vibe that program was assembling that year. That realization was genuinely useful for her, because it meant a rejection wasn’t a verdict.
The hardest version of this conversation is the one you have in November or December, when the first pre-screen results are coming in and some of them aren’t what you hoped. The thing to hold onto is that your kid is going to get rejections - pretty much every kid in this process does, at some schools - and the goal is to make sure they don’t internalize those rejections as a judgment on who they are as an artist. The luck part of this process is real, and uncontrollable, and the sooner you can help them understand that and make peace with it, the better they’ll be able to show up fully in the rooms where it matters.
They’ll end up where they’re supposed to - but it only works if you’ve built a list where they’d genuinely be happy at any school on it, not just the ones near the top.