<p>Any program worth attending, whether liberal or vocational, is going to be “challenging” in some way or other. Those vocational programs are not easy.</p>
<p>I think you may have grown up in a family where the adults had stereotypes that anything other than Ivy League was something “easy” designed for “stupid people”. That’s the kind of family I grew up in. But it is simply not true. These programs are very challenging, even if they are not in the Ivy League. (And some are very hard to get into, although the emphasis is on audition and interview instead of academic qualifications)</p>
<p>If you find that you need some sort of “academic challenge” in addition to all the challenging work you will be doing, you can go find an academic challenge on your own. Find some difficult books and read them on your own time, or something like that.</p>
<p>Are you going to miss out on your “prime years” if you go to a more academic program as an undergrad then a more vocational program as a grad? I don’t know, because there is no way of knowing which are going to be your “prime years”. Some actors “prime years” are quite late in their life. But it does seem to me that you will be losing three years where you could be playing those younger roles that you will not be able to play when you are older. And on the other hand, college isn’t going anywhere, you can go to college or back to college at any age.</p>
<p>I believe (And anyone is free to disagree) that the focus of college or university should be to get the qualifications you need for your career. Because you don’t need qualifications for a hobby. If you want a career in academics, if you want to be a professor, then you probably want to look at good academic qualifications. But if academics are just sort of a hobby, you don’t need academic qualifications.</p>
<p>But I also agree with the people who are suggesting that you may be overly rigid in you classification of programs into “academic” and “vocational”. Because if you look hard enough, you will find programs that are both. The Ivy League schools pretty much leave out the “vocational” part, so you probably won’t find them there. But there are other programs in the arts that are just as academically challenging and just as prestigious as the Ivies, and combine this with a good vocational training as well.</p>