Hello! I am a current vocal performance major. At my school, they have vocal performance and theatre program but not musical theatre. There is almost a feud between the departments, and that’s a main reason I’m looking at transferring. The reason behind is this that our VP was a very classical track and focused primarily on opera. The theatre department does musicals every couple of years and decided to do Rocky Horror, and the vocal performance majors were NOT supposed to even audition because the roles were different than the classical training we were focusing on and would/could have interfered with the classical training. All singing is very different and while it’s not impossible to do both, you may want to focus on a type of voice/singing that you’d want to pursue first, based on the “end-goal”. If the ultimate goal is Broadway- go for musical theatre. If the end goal is opera- go vocal performance. Personally, I think it would be more likely to get a Broadway job with a VP trained voice rather than an opera job with a MT trained voice.
Another point I cannot stress enough to young students applying to undergrad in the arts is that the arts are labor-intensive majors. I had 12 classes fall semester, only 1 being a general education class and taking a maximum credit hour load at 18 credit hours because a lot of music classes only count one credit hour, where a science with a lab is 4. You’ll have rehearsals and classes all day and private lessons and studio classes somewhere in there. PLUS you need to practice in college 30-60 minutes a day (whatever your teacher recommends- don’t over do it!) which takes up a lot of time. If you add a college level rehearsal schedule for musical theatre on top of this (which can include dance classes, blocking, table work and general rehearsal) you’ll have a schedule that’s too much to do. I basically had class starting with 8AM music theory and ending with rehearsal for theatre at 10PM.
I hope any of this helped! I am really not trying to discourage anything and I hope you follow whatever your dream is, but don’t overwhelm yourself and don’t do anything you don’t absolutely love.
(Also, I’m from Ohio and CCM at U of Cincinnati is amazing! I’m looking there for my transfer.)