<p>Funny you should mention the Playbill bios as a listing of colleges attended by working MT actors. My D’s music teacher suggested this very approach last summer as a technique for helping my D begin her college search. </p>
<p>He pointed out that there is no correlation between a prestigious university and a top MT program. We checked this out and he was right. Of the top 30 or so universities in the overall national US News rankings I count only five with well regarded MT programs – NYU, Carnegie Mellon, University of Michigan, Northwestern and UCLA. The data was even more striking among the national liberal arts colleges. Only one – Muhlenberg College – is in the US News top 50. Clearly traditional rankings and reputations of the overall institution were not that helpful to a student with her heart set on pursuing MT. </p>
<p>As her teacher pointed out, many of the best MT programs are at otherwise unheard of or unheralded colleges and universities – Baldwin-Wallace College, Oklahoma City University, Otterbein College and University of Cincinnati to name a few. Scanning the Playbill bios was one way to identify some of successful programs, particularly those we were unfamiliar with in other states and regions. </p>
<p>In addition to surveying all the playbills of the touring shows that come through our area, we took a systematic, if not scientific approach to the search of all the shows currently on Broadway. We accomplished this through the playbill website which contains actor bios for current shows. </p>
<p>Before I share our general thoughts, let me say there are some limitations to our technique. Only about a third of the actors on Broadway list their undergraduate training in their bios. It appeared that the longer an actor had been working and the more numerous their credits the less likely they were to list their college or conservatory. Also, it is not clear that the five or six touring shows that come to our town are necessarily representative of the many touring productions and regional theaters. There are many actors working in other venues from other schools. In addition, we did not take into account class size – you would expect an NYU to have a much larger representation than Otterbein if for no other reason than NYU graduates many more students.</p>
<p>With that said, here’s a summary of what we found. There are indeed a few schools that produce a relatively large number of working actors – NYU, Michigan, CMU, BoCo, OCU and CCM were among the most frequently listed. More striking was the shear number of schools we saw listed, more than forty in all, almost all of them listed in the links above.</p>
<p>One thing that made us feel good about this exercise is that it confirmed much of what we had learned here at College Confidential and what our D had learned at her summer program – MPulse at Michigan. The collective wisdom of these two sources was confirmed by our little empirical effort. This gave us confidence in helping our D choose the schools she applied to. I recommend this approach to juniors who are starting their college searches.</p>
<p>Sorry this was more long winded than I intended. Good luck to all those who are embarking on their auditions.</p>