Hi, I am currently a high school senior. I have a 3.5w/3.1uw cumulative gpa. I want to go to major in musical theater at one of these schools: Ithaca, NYU Tisch, CMU, UNCO, Elon. I am taking a full schedule of classes my senior year to raise my gpa. Do these schools consider the grades or the audition more? Also, out of these schools, where can I get the most financial aid? Thanks!
Audition
NYU audition and grades are 50/50.
These are all very competitive schools to get in. Most will care far more about your audition than your grades. But NYU and Elon will both want to see good grades and test scores along with a killer audition. Your grades may be strong enough to get in the others academically. Do all you can to raise your grades. Strong test scores will also help. But know that even if you pass the academic requirements, all will be highly competitive in terms of their auditions.
If you have not done so already, I would encourage you to expand your list to include some schools that are possibly less difficult to get in. Your list is mainly comprised of very top programs in the country.
As far as financial aid goes, I don’t think any of these are known to give huge amounts of aid. Even if you get $20,000 per year from NYU, you still have over $50,000 to pay for yourself each year. Same for Carnegie Mellon. Elon is slightly less expensive but competition for scholarship $ there is fierce. I am less familiar with UNCO and Ithaca as D did not consider either of those programs.
If you are looking for lower cost alternatives, there are many threads on CC that discuss this. One school that gives great scholarship and may have slightly better acceptance rates than those on your list is Ohio Northern. There are a few schools that offer in-state tuition to MT students from out of state including Texas State, Montclair and Utah. So you may want to look into those. But they all have a lot of people audition so admittance is fairly competitive.
The other thing is, all of these schools on your list are very different from one another in terms of size, location, and curriculum. You may want to do a little more research and figure out what type of programs really suit you best. These are all great programs. But very different from one another.