Hi CC community,
I was active here during my application process (ca. 2012-2013) and, after hearing about what happened with UArts and how it left so many students hanging, I decided to make this post with some reflections about my time as a student in a BFA Acting program to help students and parents alike who are trying to make this big decision.
For context: I’m a Latinx person who studied in a prestigious BFA program in California under a partial scholarship and a student visa. I graduated a semester early, but officially with the class of 2017. Due to the hardship of applying for a work permit as an actor, I was forced to leave the U.S. about a year after graduation and found my new home in Europe. Since then I’ve worked more or less steadily as a professional actor and writer, first only in the theater, and now for film/TV. For many years I also worked for a company that helps international students apply to art schools in the US/UK/Canada and developed a program for building portfolios and preparing for auditions – I worked with this new generation even during the pandemic and am up-to-date with the challenges faced by them.
Parents of these students have often asked me if I thought it was a worthy investment to send their kids to art schools. Although I truly believe that an arts education is never wasted – the skills developed can be applied to a variety of careers – I don’t think it’s worth taking on massive amounts of debt for. Don’t get me wrong, I despise the fact that accessing higher education has become such an elitist thing, but that’s the world we live in.
Many people see student loans as an investment. I’ve heard parents say “I believe my kid will be successful, so we’ll be fine.” And I get it, all parents think their children are great and want what’s best for them. But one of the biggest failures of acting schools is that they also don’t prepare students for the realities of being a working actor, keeping these conversations as some sort of taboo secret. It’s not enough to plan for an academic career – if one is committed to a lifetime of being a professional working actor, one has to also plan for at least one decade ahead. I’ve seen so many of my super-talented classmates having to give up on acting, because they were getting buried in bills and debts and at some point, you just have to survive. Let me repeat this for the people in the back: this is not about lack of talent. It’s about lack of financial resources, especially for low-income, Latinxs, BIPoC, migrants, and queer people/families.
Let me put it into numbers to give you a better perspective: we were 43 actors in our incoming class. Before graduation, 17 had dropped out – 9 within the first year alone (mostly due to finances). Out of the 26 left, only 6 are still acting/performing and 7 are doing something arts-related (producing, writing, managing, etc). Out of the 13 MFAs, 4 are still in the game and 3 are doing something arts-related. Of those who are still acting, every one of us does more than one thing (incl. writing, directing, teaching, self-producing, other day jobs) and only one person (unfortunately not me 
) has had some sort of wider recognition at a very low level. Two drop-outs who have family members in the industry and had already worked before acting school have been on Broadway.
Having talked to graduates of other acting programs, I think we got lucky. Things are much much worse nowadays. We all would like to think “Oh, but this won’t be me/my kid, I/they will make it big.” Unfortunately, that’s not the reality for 99% of actors. Even those who do make it big struggled at the beginning. And this is why I’m urging parents who want to support their children’s acting careers to make (financially) smart decisions on their behalf.
So here are a few tips that no one asked for, but I’m giving anyway:
1. Is it worth it?
The only place I’ve ever been to where it mattered to have a Bachelor’s degree in acting was Europe. And even then, most of them didn’t care at all about my California education – there are always 1–4 prestigious conservatories in the countries where all the actors go to and most big theaters won’t even consider hiring people who didn’t graduate from these schools.
Sorry to burst the bubble, but in most parts of the world, a degree is not a must to be successful in this profession. Training can be obtained in a variety of different ways – workshops, internships, apprenticeships with theater companies, etc. The only reason to go to acting school, in my opinion, is to make contacts. Considering this, I would think long and hard about where you/your child want(s) to end up (NY, LA, London, etc) and go there. My biggest regret was going to acting school in LA already knowing I never wanted to live in LA. All of the contacts I made were for nothing.
Make sure the teachers and alumni of the institution form a network you see yourself being a part of. And be realistic about it – if you’re a person of color and there are no alumni or teachers who are also PoC, for example, it would be much harder for you to get support and find your niche.
2. Financial planning
One of the biggest hurdles of being an actor is the inconsistent money flow. I’ve had years with steady work and a steady income – although I never lived a life in which I could afford luxuries – and years in which I haven’t had a single shooting day or project. This is the moment most people quit or get jobs that end up consuming their lives and leave them with no time to dedicate to their acting careers.
With good financial planning, it’s not impossible to get through dry spells. Start right now by investing some money for your child that they can take out in the case of emergency and help them put aside some money during their college years and after every job. Talking to a financial planner, career coach or behavioral economist is also a good idea.
Alternatively, think of using the potential money you would spend sending your child to acting school to give them a chance of having a financial future and a bit of stability when navigating the start of their careers. As I said at the beginning, I don’t think any amount of training and prestige is worth burying yourself in debt for. If this is the case, I suggest looking for other, more affordable ways of training.
As for planning for the years ahead, there’s always a good chunk of money that regularly goes into even booking a job – think good equipment for self-tapes (latest 3-camera phone), gas to drive to auditions, clothes for red carpet events (can’t repeat outfits if you’ve been photographed once and it’s on getty), admissions to conferences or other networking opportunities, fees for online casting platforms, web domain hosting, SAG/Equity fees, insurance, etc. Aside from that, actors have to constantly have their material up-to-date (headshots and reels), continue training and improving their skills (improv, stage combat, dance classes), be fit (gym membership), and look good (hairdresser, nails, regular teeth cleaning, skincare, good-quality makeup). And if you’re thinking “Oh, but this seems excessive, I can do without this” I have bad news for you – sure, you can tape your auditions with your beat-up 2020 Android and your bedroom lamp, but casting directors are not immune to biases and it makes a difference.
The preparation for an audition or also unpaid – even for roles we often end up taking much more time to prepare than we’re getting paid for. For each self-tape I take about 5-15 hours of unpaid labor. How could you find ways to afford doing that every week? Twice a week? This is something to consider.
3. Develop other skills
As I mentioned, almost no actor I know is just an actor. Even some really successful European actor friends of mine have side gigs – dubbing, audiobooks, podcasts, ghost writing, stunting, cosplaying, assistant directing. It’s imperative to develop other marketable skills so you can always have something to fall back on when the going gets tough.
If you’re a creative who wants to work in the theater, I cannot stress enough how important it is that you leave college with good knowledge of grant writing. Trust me. It’ll make a huge difference in your life.
A minor is not a bad idea. But majoring in something else is also something to consider.
4. Know the dirty side of acting school
This is a tough one to write, but I think we need to talk about it. It’s a well-kept secret that acting programs are often traumatizing and sometimes even abusive. In the process of “building you up” as an actor, schools make you lose your sense of self, your value, your bodily autonomy, and even your right to have boundaries. It’s not a normal thing to be scrutinized in your every move and criticized for the way you walk, talk, move your hands, stand, BREATHE. Many schools, if not all, build a cult-like culture that messes with students’ heads. I believe this dynamic comes from European institutions, where the teacher or director is a God-like creature and humiliation is seen as a normal part of the process. This dynamic repeats itself in professional theaters and film sets. And this is not unique to one part of the world: actors from all over the Americas, Europe, Iran, Turkey, Russia, Lebanon, etc have told me they have gone through similar things in their training.
I personally left acting school broken, enraged, traumatized, and lost. I left a worse actor than how I came in. They took my raw talent and made me stiff and self-conscious – something that took me years to undo. They took the joy of acting away from me. Almost every single classmate of mine that I’ve talked to about that feels the same way.
For young and impressionable people, it’s hard to separate these toxic experiences from challenges that make you grow as a person. So many of my former classmates have serious mental health or addiction issues stemming from their time in acting school. That’s why I never recommend any 18-year-old to go to acting school straight from high school. I recommend taking 1-2 gap years, getting to know yourself and what you want, and only then – if you still want to study acting – apply.
Remember studying acting ≠ being an actor.
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Acting is not just a profession, it’s a lifestyle. You can’t separate the two. Everything you eat, how good or bad your sleep is, if you brushed your teeth or not, the energies of the people around you – it all affects your acting. Actors commit to giving their body to this liminal space of imaginary characters, which often means having to make sacrifices. Whether it’s something small like not getting tattoos or not impusively cutting your bangs whenever you want, to something bigger like being apart from your partner/family for a year when shooting out of town, interrupting vacations because of an audition, or never being able to afford nice things. Being an actor is not something you can do on the side or just as “a job”.
So, for those of you who are questioning whether this path is worth it, I wanted to leave you with a wonderful quote from Elizabeth Gilbert’s book “Big Magic”. I always read this to my students who were on the fence about committing to this life or not.
“What’s your favorite flavor of sht sandwich?” What Manson means is that every single pursuit—no matter how wonderful and exciting and glamorous it may initially seem—comes with its own brand of sht sandwich, its own lousy side effects. As Manson writes with profound wisdom: “Everything sucks, some of the time.” You just have to decide what sort of suckage you’re willing to deal with. So the question is not so much “What are you passionate about?” The question is “What are you passionate enough about that you can endure the most disagreeable aspects of the work?” Manson explains it this way: “If you want to be a professional artist, but you aren’t willing to see your work rejected hundreds, if not thousands, of times, then you’re done before you start. If you want to be a hotshot court lawyer, but can’t stand the eighty-hour workweeks, then I’ve got bad news for you.” Because if you love and want something enough—whatever it is—then you don’t really mind eating the sh*t sandwich that comes with it.”
Hope this was useful to some of you and my DMs are open if you have any questions or concerns about your path.