For the original poste, I don’t have any experience with California schools (my D was interested in NY/Boston), but I have a LOT of experience with the college search as a parent, having done college recruiting for a company, and having served on an admissions committee when I was in graduate school. My synopsis:
- If your D is focused on California, then that is actually helpful because it prunes down the list of hundreds of potential schools to a list of dizens
- It is wise to try NOT get too emotionally invested in a particular school before acceptance. Yes, priorities are good. But the audition process is such a crapshoot that there is no guarantee that even the most talented kid with the highest GPA will get in where thy want to
- Decide NOW whether it is better to apply to non-audition safety schools, or whether your daughter would take a gap year and re-apply rather than "settle" for a safety school. My personally opinion is that there are plenty of top notch BA programs (non-audition) that provide great training, a great education, and a wonderful 4 years for a bachelors. But I also know friends whose kids have taken the gap year route and been very happy with it
That’s not ironclad advice, to be sure. But the main point is that this is a proce\ss, and like most of life you can’t define in advance what you or your daughter will get out of it. The whole audition and college visit process can be very enjoyable if you make it so, but you can’t pre-ordain the results.