We’re like mom4bwayboy. My D is very strong academically (she goes to a performing arts high school where admittance was based on audition AND grades and test scores), takes all honors classes, and has a 96 average. But in college, she wants to focus purely on acting and musical theatre training - she doesn’t want to take a lot of academic classes. So that being the case, she doesn’t care if it’s an academically selective college - she just wants one with very strong musical theatre training. She also wants to stay in New York or nearby. (We live in Brooklyn.)
So with that in mind, schools like Marymount Manhattan (she’d like to do the BFA in acting with the musical theatre minor) and the Molloy/CAP21 program are very attractive to us: schools with great musical theatre training AND tons of merit aid for a strong academic student, which would make them very affordable so she wouldn’t have to have too much student debt. NYU is less appealing because it’s SO expensive and she wouldn’t get merit aid, since ALL the students they accept are strong academically.
So our feeling is that if she’s going to focus on musical theatre training, the regular academics aren’t important, and a less academically selective school will give her a lot of merit aid money. (However, the musical theatre training has to be top notch.)