Thanks, Notmath1! I started posting here in response to vocal health questions and that’s generally when I speak up. (I’m a medical voice therapist as well as the founder/Director of MTCA.) In answer to your 2 questions:
- As an educator, I personally like that each school asks for what they want to see in the audition process. This is one way for schools to identify students who fit their program's sensibility. I think Sheri (who wrote the article in the Huff Post) is excellent and I agree with a lot of the other things she says in the article, but her suggested audition package doesn't cover all that the industry currently demands; that depends on how you define the industry.
In my experience, the part of the process which could be streamlined with huge benefit for students and parents is the audition scheduling process. I’m not sure such streamlining is actually possible, given the app and prescreen assessments that need to take place in many cases before auditions can be scheduled, but wouldn’t it be a beautiful thing to have a centralized scheduling website, at least for Unifieds schools? C’mon, IT parents, you can develop it! 
- I have thought a lot over the years about what made the number of auditionees increase so much in the late 00's. There were 2 years college faculty referred to as the "Glee effect" years - 2009-10 and 10-11 - when the applicant pool for MT grew 20% BOTH years, meaning 20% and then ANOTHER 20% the next year. I think in addition to Glee, and probably even bigger, was the advent of YouTube. Andrew Keenan-Bolger started putting up Michigan MT videos when he was a junior or 1st semester senior (in spring or fall of 2006 - he graduated in 2007). YouTube was then in its infancy, and those videos went viral before viral in the non-germ sense was even a concept. Students all over the world could suddenly experience college MT singers, newly out-of-school performers, and exciting shows which they never would have known about before.` As more social media tools were created, the reach of shows and performers which are exciting to teens became greater and greater. For a time, I observed that televised things like The Voice and American Idol also made it seem like "fame" was within anyone's reach, although that effect seems to have diminished over the last few years and most students no longer have that uninformed way of thinking. Social media is here to stay, so teens all over the world will continue to be able to experience shows and performers who move and inspire them.
Some coaches, like Mary Anna and I and others in local programs, were simply teachers who were doing there thing already when demand for help with the college process exploded, and we were approached by happy parents with the idea of spreading the word about what we were already doing. Other coaches seem to have begun their work in response to the demand - but the only coaching genesis story I really know is mine and MTCA’s. 