The $$$ side of things is a large part of her and our decision as well. She will have her Associate’s degree completed through dual enrollments and college credits taken at a local CC and her top choice in state school will likely accept close to all (also her cheapest option with academic merit) so she may have the potential to have her undergrad BS in 2 years (or go slower, lighter load and double minor/major/study abroad). We are hoping that if she can supplement her training via a minor, dance team or student run dance clubs and possibly have her degree by the time she is 20 she wouldn’t be so far behind if she wanted to transition back more into dance.
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My D went to one of the top 4 ballet colleges. They started with about 36 in the class, 25 graduated with a BFA, 12 went for professional careers at that point. This is the third year out of college and D and her roommate are the last two girls left in a major company. They aren’t being paid. One guy got a contract out of college. A couple of girls are dancing at Disneyland, one’s in a traveling (Rockettes type) dance company and a couple more are dancing part-time. Many of the most talented dancers at her college quit or got injured. D’s main advantages have been not getting injured, and above all not worrying about money, along with working very hard and still enjoying the sacrifices of a dance-focused lifestyle.
In her company, there’s one girl who was a trainee for 2 years after high school, then didn’t get a contract, went and did a four year degree at Stanford and came back afterwards to join the company. But most did dance out of high school and are either doing some online college or are leaving college until later. A lot of dance companies don’t want to hire people older than 22-23. Conversely a lot of universities seem to quite like applicants who’ve done something that requires hard work and dedication.
I think it would be hard to rush through a college degree to go back to dance (you can’t really complete a BFA in less than 3-3.5 years anyway). A lot of dancers who are really missing the dancing do a year of college then drop out. But that’s because they aren’t really academically oriented and enjoying college. And if she has injuries now, especially something that’s likely to recur, going back to dance might also be unrealistic. The training in a company is vastly more intense than anything in college (even a BFA was less than the 25 hours per week that D was dancing in high school, whereas now its usually 40 hours a week, frequently six days a week since they have shows most months during the season). D typically goes to the gym or Pilates after class when they don’t have rehearsal and also has to ice her feet every night.
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You make excellent points! I appreciate your insight and sharing your daughter’s experience. Ty!
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This makes me mad. As the parent of a performing artist (music) I see how hard dancers work, and how often they are not paid or seriously underpaid. They are offered unpaid “internships and fellowships” while the organizations they volunteer for make money.
Grrrr!
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I had no idea this was a norm for dancers. I find this really awful.
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I think the challenge is that ballet schools are a key source of funding for companies. You pay for the training there all through high school. So it’s seen as a natural transition that you then move onto additional training (second company) which you don’t pay for, and only after that do you get a full company (paid) position. Some companies even charge for ”pre-pro” training beyond high school if they don’t have a formal second company.
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3 years out of college and aren’t being paid?!
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While I love ballet, there are things about the ballet world that I find, to put it bluntly, unconscionable. Even company dancers are generally paid ~34 weeks/yr and early dancers sometimes are paid under minimum wage if you consider # of hours dancing/wk. If my D25 didn’t light up when dancing… There was discussion amongst parents recently that 2-4 years of paying to dance is now considered “normal”–with or without college. Obviously, this varies, but the fact that that appeared to be a fairly agreed upon range is crazy to me.
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Yes, agree with these challenges 100% as well. I will add, the college option would be an academic major/dance minor rather than a BFA option. She recognizes that most if not all of the gen eds credits she earned would not apply into a BFA or dance major curriculum which is factoring into her decision process as well. Realistically, we don’t expect her to pursue a ballet company type opportunity post-college if she takes this path but perhaps a different professional dance opportunity may be a possibility. She has expressed interest in auditioning for the Rockettes and also has jazz, tap training. She has completed summer intensives with professional ballet companies/schools and company experiences and I think that at least right now that may not be where her heart and head are at, despite how much she loves ballet and dance. That said, I don’t think she wants to close the door entirely on it which is why were trying to find a somewhat happy medium between a traditional college experience while still keeping some classical training and performance opportunities in the mix.
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Bracing myself for what could be a tough week for S25. All of his reach schools announce between this Friday and next Friday. And given the way Engineering applications seem to be going this cycle, I’m not feeling very hopeful. I’ve already told him that a defer at any would be amazing. We’ve got Maryland, Wisconsin, UF, Michigan and UIUC. Ugh.
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fingers crossed for your kid/ family at least a couple admits in there:)
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fingers crossed for him 
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We are in waiting mode at this point for DS. The only one we know about is acceptance to Pitt Engineering. Virginia Tech should come in February. Also waiting on U of SC and Rensselaer (which I just found out needs the CSS filled out and I dread it). He has 2 nominations to USNA, and USMMA and one nomination to USAFA. He has an LOA to USMMA. He currently is medically disqualified but with a waiverable issue. So far only USMMA seems to be moving on that. We are also waiting for AFROTC (which won’t be until March) and NROTC which who knows when, he could have gone up for review last week but his portal has a weird status in it- I am honestly sick of this whole process and am so glad we only have 2 kids, I don’t think I could do this again 
. We had boarding school applications in 2020 and 2021, college apps since fall 2022 since DD transferred. So I have been filling out financial aid and supporting kids by nagging about essays and deadlines since 2020. I am done! The medical questionnaire I had to fill out for him for military academies took 3 hours, and all records from pharmacies and doctors had to be gathered. He only applied to 4 regular colleges and 3 academies but it was so much more work than the 11 schools DD applied to. I feel like part of getting into an academy is just being able to get through the application process!
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Trying to rally and book the tickets for Tour de Blizzard 2025 (as I’m thinking of it) next month. I wish we had more certainty about his chances at Case, Rochester, and Lafayette but I’m not going to belabor that. Road trips are fun, even to upstate New York in the dead of winter!
Sad news from our little quail farm: Gyro, who vainly attempted to hatch and eventually required some delicate assistance from S25, didn’t make it. We are going to be adding them to our small pet cemetery in the backyard (Contents: various goldfish + the hamster of S25’s classmate who unfortunately died three days into a 10-day pet-sitting gig. We were instructed by the owners that sometimes hamsters look dead but are actually hibernating, so we should put it somewhere warm and wait for it to wake up. Turns out warming up an already very dead rodent has a pretty predictable result. Not waiting around to learn this lesson again.)
Fortunately Speedwagon and Gizmo are continuing to thrive, although we still haven’t managed to integrate them into the same habitat.
I will say that watching S25 bravely attempting to liberate poor Gyro was gut-wrenching and beautiful. My sweet animal-loving boy!
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I am hoping our trip to Denver in March isn’t the same!
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C25 had a stress freakout about the whole application/decision process Friday, so we’ve spent some time talking through the options off and on since then. Here’s where we stand (reminder—planning to double major in mathematics and linguistics with a possible minor in German, family is searching for Big Merit Aid™):
- The in-state options either don’t offer lx, or don’t offer the sort of lx C25 is interested in. (They both offer math, but nearly everybody offers pretty much the same math curriculum—no differentiation there.) So strike them off.
- Oregon, Binghamton, and St Joseph’s didn’t provide good enough Big Merit Aid™. They’re off.
- The two least expensive OOS options, Washington State and Nevada, have lx programs that don’t really have enough of a focus on lx as lx—one is really half English/half lx, and the other has too much of an ESL focus. So I hit the strikethrough button on the spreadsheet.
- Hofstra, the next least expensive option (something like just $97 more than Washington State), has a solid lx program, and on close review isn’t as focused on forensic lx as C25 had thought. (That’s the clear focus of their MA program, and mentioned in all of their promotional literature.) Their math program has weird names for some of the classes, but once you get past that it’s pretty normal. So they’re currently the leading contender.
- Pitt and Western Washington both have good lx curricula (and Pitt has a well-known and very solid lx program, and one of their faculty is one of the people whose research sparked the child’s interest in the field), so they’re strong contenders. If either of them, especially Pitt (which is a longer shot for this), come in with a competitive Big Merit Aid™ offer, they’re likely to displace Hofstra.
- Syracuse and Rochester haven’t released RD admissions decisions yet, and good enough scholarships are a really long shot. If either of them make it comparatively affordable, though, they’re likely to jump to the top of the list. Syracuse may have the overall edge between the two, but Rochester has both an unusual-in-a-good-way math program and a very strong ASL program (and C25 wants to take a year or two of ASL to get a non-Indo-European language), so if lightning strikes twice it’ll be a hard call.
So now we’re back to just background levels of stress rather than C25 being convinced that everything is falling apart, so that’s good.
And something we realized after the review of curricula is that the remaining contenders—though Pitt less so than the rest—are all within a few hours of family via regional rail or Amtrak or a relatively short drive. (Western Washington fits this in the sense that Seattle has multiple daily nonstop flights back home to Anchorage.) So that’s good, too.
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Spent afternoon booking LOTS of revisit days. My 25 only applied EA to schools, so has heard from most already (though eagerly awaiting 2 more - one is a big reach though). 25 is really open at this point to all their admitted schools… (all are OK financially for us).
I realized we can bring our '27 on their first official tour. (Cornell while 25 is seeing Ithaca College again). They are quite different kids in terms of interests, scores, grades (and even go to different HS), so next round will be quite different in some ways!
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We are also booking a lot of revisits. I had sworn I wasn’t doing a bunch this time around after doing several with D23.
But he’s my last kid. 
I’m a stay at home mom and I have the time. My husband travels so much for work that we have tons of hotel points and miles so I’m just going to take him wherever he wants and enjoy this last time with him.
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I’m so sorry to hear your C25 had a stress breakout, yet I’m impressed you were able to talk them back from the ledge and get a solid list of what sounds like some pretty awesome options. Good luck in the coming weeks with the merit aid news!
And I’m glad to hear there are relations within a reasonable traveling distance for all the options. Maybe the perspective is very different from an Alaska resident, but I could see where having that safety net of someone close-by-ish might make a college choice OOS easier.
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I love that this trip has an official name! I don’t wish that actual weather on you, but I do hope you get some snow anyway!!
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