Here are the factors that we considered:
- Input from faculty members at her PAHS, who had decades of experience getting kids into all kinds of programs from the tippy-top famous ones to the hidden gems.
- We used Mary Anna Dennard as a coach for d, and she supplies a great list for her clients.
- I did a survey of every Broadway show and National Tour and counted all the schools noted (in this post: http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/13750942#Comment_13750942)
- I looked at the amount of traffic here on CC for the schools posted at the top of the forum (which can be found here: http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/musical-theater-schools/) - although this is pretty weak indicator, it points to many of the usual suspects.
- I looked through lots of old threads here on CC about the "top" schools for MT - while individual posts should be taken with less than a grain of salt, when taken in aggregate I think you can form a decent picture of the usual suspects. You can find links to some of the old threads on this topic here: http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/20796944#Comment_20796944
- I read back through all the old "Acceptances," "Rejections," and "Final Decisions" threads and kept a running tally of what I found. It is pretty clear that a lot more students get offers from certain schools than other ones.
- D's high school hosts a large regional audition each year and by looking at the size of the callback lists, you can get a pretty decent picture of the highly competitive programs (their lists are usually quite short).
Through it all, I was looking more for “data trends” rather than trying to establish any sort of detailed ranking. I didn’t really care what the actual numbers were or their accuracy, I was much more interested in which names seemed to consistently float to the top, whatever method of analysis was used.