<p>We didn’t spend as much as we are on a tight budget. We are fortunate in that we live close to NYC. Flying somewhere and staying in a hotel would have been difficult for us. To those who qualify for financial aid and/or who are on free/reduced lunch: You can get your application fee/audition fee waived/reduced for most colleges. It’s best to go through your guidance counselor. You can also contact the college directly.</p>
<p>However, it will still inevitably cost money.
What helped me was that I viewed it as a business investment–an investment in their college careers. Honestly, this frame of mind helped me very much. Even with tight budgeting, I’m guessing we spent about $1000 when all was said and done (gas, tolls, copying costs, some hotel for on-site auditions, reduced fees, full fees, etc).</p>
<p>We are and were on an extremely tight budget and it is easy to spend copious amounts on everything. We have three kids in college currently and are not high earners so we did our best to save wherever we could. We, however, were not eligible for reduced applications or anything.
We did his pre-screen video with an IPhone camera and his voice teacher played piano…no problems there and he made it through all pre-screens. He did a three day college audition course summer before applications and the instructor who is well connected in NYC continued to provide advice around song choice, monologues, schools, etc. so we didn’t have ongoing coaching fees or anything like that. We did not do a professional headshot but used one from a recent community theater production he was in and we were able to copy it. It looked fine. My husband did his resume and we actually had two schools say they liked the format.
For NYC, we would stay in Stamford and head into the city early for auditions…maybe not ideal but it worked out very well for us and we didn’t have any problems. We whittled down schools along the way. We didn’t complete the application for one school we found out was $69,000 and the average financial aid packet (including loans) was about $25,000. We knew that was not going to work and we didn’t want to see him with $80,000 in loans at the end of four years.
The expenses are ongoing as a first year but I feel like we know what to expect. Where he goes to school in London, it is different. We were pleasantly surprised his first day when he came out of school with two big bags of books which are apparently included in the fees and next week, all the Degree students are going to “Charlie and The Chocolate Factory” in the West End and that apparently is paid for as part of the “fees”. There are many less “surprises” this year than last when on at least one occasion we were frantically trying to locate a Kinkos to copy more headshots and resumes at the last minute because both the dance part of the audition wanted one and the vocal part.<br>
It does get better though and we learned so much throughout the process. I felt like last year people didn’t speak so much about the financial strain and we felt a little out of place as it was such a struggle for us but we made it and he ended up with some very nice options in the end. We knew that ultimately it would all come down to finances with where he would attend and it did.</p>
<p>The good thing for us is that I found this website early enough to PLAN for the expenses of auditioning. It would be much harder not knowing what was coming. I’ll be opening a separate account for this stuff… and start squirreling away funds for the next year.</p>
It would sure be nice if we could deduct all of these fees. The refund we would all get next year… HA!</p>