<p>@toowonderful I agree that it is important to not blow up a compliment and think that is means more than it does. But in the case I am referring to and the experience I am telling first hand, I am not referring to just “words.” </p>
<p>My daughter attended a summer pre-college program in Musical Theatre given by Steinhardt the summer before senior year. It was a very talented group of students, and the program itself was run by Steinhardt’s full time faculty. About 2 weeks into the program the head of VP told the students that some of them would have the opportunity to apply to NYU’s VP (MT) program without any further auditioning. They would have an artistic acceptance based on their summer work. All students were told to contact him in September to see if they were being offered that opportunity.</p>
<p>My D and about 10 others were offered that opportunity. They did not need to audition any further. They only needed to submit an application and make it known to the program’s head that they had applied.</p>
<p>Since we were local, we met with him and he spoke to us about the program in detail. D made it known that NYU was her first choice. He asked her SAT score and he was very pleased that they were fairly good. He even told her not to bother re-taking the test since she had obviously passed the benchmark she needed. (2000+) He advised her not to apply ED since he could try to get her merit aid (no need.)</p>
<p>As it turned out, D graduated NYU in 2012 with about 6 of the students from the summer program who had the automatic talent acceptance.</p>
<p>The boy I had referred to in my previous post did not have the same outcome. He was also told he was artistically accepted, but he did not have the grades and scores. He did not get accepted…which leads back to the original discussion that certain schools have academic criteria that must be met.</p>
<p>The reason I brought any of this up on this post is that this shows the importance of academics and that in NYU it is 50-50 (talent/academics) as they state for both Steinhardt and Tisch. So while there are differences in Tisch and Steinhardt…and truthfully I don’t think the Tisch summer program has ever offered the artistic acceptance that I am talking about (probably because the full-time faculty–the actual audtion committee!-- is not as involved with Tisch’s summer offerings)…the bottom line is that it is the policy for ALL of NYU that audition/portfolio programs are 50-50.</p>
<p>But NYU under normal circumstances will not say whether a student was accepted artistically, but not academically. Applicants are either accepted or rejected. This case illustrates the point.</p>