<p>Our choice has been to fly without a safety net. Plan B is a gap year. The gap year would be spent training and also working. My S came a little late to the understanding that he could potentially make a career of his passion, so the last few years have been spent catching up on the training - between school and arts commitments, he’s never really had the chance to work for a living. A job washing dishes, pumping gas, waiting table or whatever would be a good experience. He can fit in plenty of training and auditioning around that. We are also very fortunate to live in an area with outstanding training opportunities.
I realize that this is not right for every family, but we feel it is for us. College is a huge financial sacrifice (costs being what they are, I don’t think you can even dignify it by calling it an investment). Acting and musical theater careers don’t even necessarily require a degree, so our reasoning was let’s make sure we are paying for something we value.<br>
My S is applying to 11 schools, some acting, some MT, some both. We cut some schools of the list because we just didn’t feel they were how we wanted to spend the money, but we’d be happy with every single one of the schools to which he did apply. The very real risk, of course, is a “gap” year. But we see some real advantages to that, as well. I think the hardest part, for which you need to be mentally prepared, is this time period, where he has 3 rejections in hand, but we are waiting on 8 schools to receive our first acceptance (one of the schools did accept him as a BA and encourage him to enter their BA drama program, but we don’t think that works for us). This waiting period is always miserable, but much more so when you have applied to programs that are either reasonably or very hard to gain admission, and have no acceptances in hand. We still think it is the right thing to do for us - but not everyone.</p>