Son can't make decision about NYU Tisch, New School, UT Austin

Gyokoren
Fri, 21 Apr 2017 13:07:41 +0000

An option I will suggest if he really wants a BFA is to take a gap year so he won’t already be into his allotted aid at a school he doesn’t necessarily want to be and in the meantime, do some better research to find schools that won’t be as much of a financial drain. Don’t all the colleges have to provide accurate(ish) cost calculators now?

Are there not some Texas state schools besides Austin that have BFAs? Maybe try for those next year along with some less expensive out-of-state options. He could probably get academic scholarships to some of them if he has the stats to pass the threshhold for NYU.

I know that lots of kids dream of going to college in NYC, but that dream can become a nightmare when they graduate and can’t afford to stay there. $160,000 in debt? No way! Does anybody even know what the monthly payments for that would be? Even if he is brilliant and lands a role on Broadway straight out of school, the AEA minimum is $1,861 a week which is all he will make until until he is a “name” with a Q Score. That isn’t enough to even begin making a dent in that kind of debt. Don’t even get me started on the scant pay for SAG-AFTRA co-stars and one day guests combined with the $3,000 initiation fee for which actors who made bad decisions when they were 18 take out even more loans on top of the strangulation they already suffer from college.

I came from a good public arts magnet and the teachers there only recommend the really expensive BFAs that are not known for being generous with grants and scholarships to students with rich parents for whom money is no object. Unfortunately, on our Facebook group, almost every single year, we still end up having to talk a kid off the ledge who didn’t listen and gets accepted to a prestigious private school that he can’t afford - most often NYU, CMU, or Syracuse.

Sorry. I promised myself that I wouldn’t give advice here except on the thread I started, but this one made my fingers too itchy.