This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:00] Charlie Murphy: Hello, hello, and welcome to a very special episode of Mapping The College Audition. I am your host, Charlie Murphy, Director of MTCA. That's Musical Theatre, College Auditions. Check us out at mtca.com. And today we've got a whole lot of me. Man, I really set us up with a very special episode. We'll see how special it is. But happy holidays to you all. This is your holiday audio blog episode. This episode is going to come out Christmas Eve, for those of you who celebrate, shortly after that eighth candle has burned out for Hanukkah. That's tonight as I record this, for those of us in the tribe. Happy Hanukkah. Happy Christmas. Happy everything to everyone. We have had a holiday full of presence and joy already in the Murphy household.

It is really special getting to celebrate holidays with a young one. I know the parent listeners out there will know exactly what I mean. Sulvi has been absolutely and utterly over-spoiled by her grandparents, much to my wife and my chagrin. But luckily, she's already engaged in some really delightful Boxing Day rituals. If you don't know what Boxing Day is, go Google it, look it up. It's really special. We're going to do this every year. It's the only way we can deal with our grandparents and their wonderful and kind and oppressive generosity that is invading my household. Today is going to be a special episode, mostly where I'm just going to read you a blog post. We did this over the summer, and we got really good feedback.

I thought, why make you wait until next summer for these delightful audio blogs, which everybody loves? For those who prefer reading, we will publish this blog as well. I believe it'll be published by the time this comes out, if not very shortly afterward. If you want to get all of our blog content, feel free to subscribe to our sub stack to get your blogs in your inbox. If you don't know what a sub stack is, you can subscribe to it. It basically will send a blog to your inbox when we post a new one. We only added sub stack this year. We've had the blog for a couple of years now, but we only added sub stack as a social media platform this year. But we're slowly dripping out both the old blogs alongside the new blogs.

You'll get the current ones, and you'll also get some of the old blogs dripped into your feed. Feel free to subscribe if you want to stay up to date with all of our blog info. You can go to substack.com and type in MTCA, or I think we're at MT College Editions, technically is our handle. But we know you'll just Google sub stack and MTCA. You Google those two words, you'll find it. The sub stack will have both blogs written by me and then also other members of the MTCA team. I write about half of our blogs now, but the other half will be by members of our team that are not me, but I'm only going to do the audio blog versions of the ones I write like today. Okay, shall we get into it? This month's audio blog, and the title is The Definitive Ultimate Universal Top 10 List of Acting and Musical Theater Colleges.

It's the holiday season, and you've come to this blog for one very important stocking stuffer, the definitive ultimate universal top 10 list of acting and musical theater colleges. Am I right? Well, as our regular blog readers will be unsurprised to hear, that title may have been a bit tongue in cheek, but here's the important truth that we tell all of our families. Such a list really doesn't exist. There are no such lists of top schools that are data-driven, objective, or in any way universally agreed upon. I want to break down some of the specifics of why that is the case, and then also get into how you can begin to form a list of schools that are quote unquote top for you. So first, let's talk about why these lists are all flawed by their nature.

Bullet point number one, subjectivity. This is probably the most obvious flaw to many of you, but it's where we have to start when we talk about these kind of top lists. You are, by the nature of this exercise, getting one person's opinion, and in most cases, it's not even a particularly expert opinion. It's just somebody on the internet who is writing a list. Sometimes they're written by someone who attended one of these schools. Sometimes a writer compiling from different sources, though I'll say rarely are they using any statistical data. I've seen schoolmates of mine write one. We've had MTCA students who have written them. That's not to say at all that any of their opinions are wrong or invalid.

It's just that they are one person's opinion. They will be biased by their own experiences. They will likely have attended one or maybe maximum two of these schools themselves, and they'll be biased by the experiences of their close friends and their colleagues. Now, for what it's worth, I do tend to prefer those lists in terms of a final product as opposed to the more aggregated lists created by non-performers, but of course that is my subjective opinion as someone who attended one of those schools myself. I always use the phrase on the podcast that this process is a subjective meritocracy. I deeply believe that. Program heads are accepting students based on who they think will be the best fit for their schools in the vast majority of cases, absent any other factors of outside influence.

That's the beautiful meritocracy part of it, but when you look at how different those opinions are from program to program, it'll spin your head. We see it each year with our numbers. That's not to say it's random, and that's an important distinction. This process is not about dumb luck, but the subjectivity is so great that it can almost feel that way at times when you're inside of it, and I say that for all the logical analytical folks out there. You're really going to love the next paragraph, I promise, because you could make an argument that everything in life is subjective. So how is this process any different? Well, if there can be degrees to subjectivity, and I think there can be, this artistic process is more subjective than others.

If you're applying to schools for computer science, there are more objective ranking metrics available for those programs and a way higher predictability of which students will get into which schools. Now, those might still be flawed themselves, but they won't feel nearly as subjective as this process will, and I think it's worth noting, the same way that it's not a random process on the student acceptance end, for example, we do see students who we could say with a high level of confidence they will do extremely well in this process, and then they do do extremely well in this process predictably, the subjectivity is not completely random on those top lists either, right? You will see some of the same schools represented on a lot of lists, and that is not at all random.

However, like with the analogy above, you will see some schools pop up on some lists at numbers that will fluctuate wildly. Some lists may have a school in the top five that doesn't make another person's list at all, and this wouldn't happen to this extreme if you compared various schools for their rankings in computer science. Bullet point number two, lies, damned lies, and statistics. Okay, sticking with our delicious fodder for our stat nerds out there, this is probably the most important bit of information I can relay for you today. Are you ready? There are just no quality, useful, objective metrics that are tracked and then appropriately statistically weighted so that you could possibly get a numerical score for schools if you wanted one.

I'm going to say that again. There are no quality, useful, objective metrics that are tracked and then appropriately statistically weighted so that you could get a numerical quote-unquote score for schools if you wanted one. Now let's take for example what is probably the closest thing to an objective metric that you have available for some of these lists, which is representation on Broadway. First off, I would quibble with that as a true metric for success since it's not every young actor's dream, especially if you're not in the musical theater. You might dream of a TV pilot or to work at the Globe in London instead, right? And it's also probably not correct to count all Broadway shows as exactly equal.

I mean, surely we can agree originating the lead in a new Broadway show with a Tony nomination might count as a different experience than booking the ensemble of Wicked. Both are huge accomplishments, but I would argue they are different. But let's put those quibbles aside for a second and imagine that it's fair to call Broadway the one and only dream and it's fair to count each instance as statistically equal. For the sake of argument, okay. But when you look at these lists, they are not appropriately statistically weighted in any way whatsoever. Meaning, when you look at some schools which pump out literally 50 to 60 students a year and compare it with another school that pumps out 12, the numbers are way out of whack.

And that's just talking musical theater BFAs. When you look at these numbers, and I'm thinking specifically of those Playbill ones, which again, I really liked that Playbill provides cleanly for you these lists of people who've been on Broadway from which schools, they're lumping together MTs, actors, and grad students all into one big pile. So for instance, a school like NYU, which has hundreds of combined undergrads and grads, is going to have a huge numerical advantage over a school like the University of Oklahoma, which graduates 12 undergrad musical theater majors a year. And that same numerical advantage is magnified when you factor that some schools have been around over 100 years while others are just starting today.

If you were to start tracking a brand new program graduating its first 12 MTs versus the 12 MTs that Carnegie Mellon graduates each year, you'd think that's apples to apples, right? But if you're looking at a list like the Playbill list, you're actually comparing 12 brand new MTs versus the over 1200 that have graduated over the past century at Carnegie Mellon. Now, maybe let's be fair and cut that in half, as I don't think there's a lot of graduates who graduated in drama school in the 40s that are still out there. But when you're considering people like Cherry Jones and Ted Danson, who are in their 70s, it's not exactly a fair playing field numerically, right? And you know, if you've been paying attention to the above, you also know that my number of 12 a year when you're talking about Carnegie Mellon, you're going to have to double that because a lot of those non-MT actors go on to star on Broadway as well.

People like Josh Gad or my classmate Will Brill. What you would hope this metric would be telling you is which school that I attend is most likely to help me get to Broadway. But you can see that without waiting for total students, both total students per year and total students over the many years, the raw total numbers are really deceiving. And that's even before you burrow deeper on the question of what is actually most relevant to you at the decision-making level and get a bit nerdy, right? Trying to tease out that question of correlation versus causation, which is given that I am a student who has gotten into school X and school Y, which school is most likely to help me get to Broadway?

Now, as we talked about before, I firmly believe the biggest differentiator between what makes one school stronger than another is which students choose to attend it. So when you come to that decision-making point for yourself, that part of which student you are has already been accounted for. You already got into Michigan. Now what, right? Do the schools make the student or do the students make the schools? Obviously, a bit of both, but I think more of the latter than the general public thinks on the front end of this process. And all of that is just one very quick breakdown of how a seemingly objective metric falls apart under the scrutiny of someone who's taken only a high school level statistics class, right?

But I do think it's worth picking up the quibbles about Broadway as a metric at all, since it really isn't the right metric for what matters to many of you. Now, it would be interesting if we could total up something like total monies earned in the business per student, but we definitely don't have those numbers available. This would, I think, successfully weight the success of a big movie over maybe a short-running theater contract, but I think would probably now mean too much weight is given to those outlier high-level successes. It would also be interesting to know a number like total entertainment jobs worked per student, or even total days of employment at an entertainment job per student, but nobody has those metrics either, right?

One of the closest metrics to this that I think could have some relevance to some of you, and which is not tracked across all schools, but some schools will talk about it, is percentage of their class signed to representation after showcase. I think it's a cool and flashy stat when schools talk about it, and I understand hearing it and getting excited, since plenty of schools will have showcases that might not yield huge results for a large percent of their students, but I just want to add a bit of caution to this idea of what quote-unquote signed with an agency might mean. For those who don't know this business well, there are different tiers of agencies. I'm not going to go deep on this, since it could be like a whole other blog post, but the difference between a huge corporate agency like CAA or WME and the smallest agency is as different as the differences between the NBA and playing for your local recreational basketball league, which maybe has a financial prize at the end, right?

You are technically playing for money in both cases, but the difference of scale is enormous. Most students out of showcase are not signing with those huge agencies. In fact, when they do, they sometimes regret it, since it can be harder to establish the roots of an early career if you're going up for huge projects against these established movie stars, right? But even taking those huge big four agencies away and just talking about the difference between a midsize and a boutique agency is significant, right? And these both can be excellent paths for a young actor starting out in their early career. I recommend both of those paths as a great way to success, but even below what we might call a standard boutique agency, there can be another level of agency, which we might kindly call starter agents, or some might call them factory agencies. I've heard them called worse things, right? Which can have inherent in their nature, a bit of a...

[13:10] Charlie Murphy: They may have hundreds of clients per agent that they're just sending out en masse and hoping one of them books, kind of like throwing paint against the wall. And they might sign you for a year on a lark before dropping you if nothing comes of it, without necessarily a ton of personal attention or care on the agent's part. And that's not to say that many young actors might not start out at an agency like this and be really successful. But it is worth noting the difference when a school is taking credit for everyone here is signed, or over half of our class signed, of whether they're talking about signing to agencies that are very selective with their incoming clients or not. Which leads me to the last metric we'll examine today, which is the competitive level of the incoming class of a school.

Basically meaning, what is the school's incoming yield? How hard is it to get into this school? How many students do they actually yield compared to their initial offers? This metric is far from perfect in terms of many factors, which we're going to discuss below. But it does offer you a bit of a wisdom of the crowds in terms of how other people have made their decisions as a whole. I'm a big believer in that principle of wisdom of the crowds. The idea that in the long run, Vegas is usually right, because if they're wrong, somebody is likely making money off it, and people are smart, right? This is the reason that a site like Polymarket is probably more accurate in predicting outcomes than an individual expert source.

Obviously, we are also a bit biased toward this particular metric, because we use a version of this in helping our students find competitive balance in their list, and we think it's a helpful tool. That said, it is far from perfect, not only because of the personalization factors we'll discuss below, but also because the numbers themselves are imperfect. Some schools publish all their numbers openly and transparently, and some will use different numbers differently. Sometimes a school will quote a number like, we have a 5% acceptance rate as a true number of how many people they actually accept total based on applications, and some will try to game the numbers a bit. You'll hear it happen on the podcast when I ask schools about it.

Some will say, well, we take an incoming class of 24, and we have 1,500 people apply, so what's that, a 1.5% acceptance rate? And on some level, sure, that's true. You can do the math. Trust me, I did it that way, right? But while some schools may accept 24 with a small waitlist to yield 24, others might accept 80 students in that initial batch to yield that 24, or in some cases, significantly more than that. And the numbers are even cloudier when you talk about waitlists. Some schools will accept 60 students to yield 20, and then use their waitlist sparingly, whereas other schools will accept that initial 20, and then use their waitlist extensively, effectively passing through the same number of students as the first school, but with a lower published initial acceptance rate.

And this latter practice has become even more popular as more students apply to more schools, and many schools are trying to get a better handle on who will actually attend their school before ultimately giving the acceptance. But all of these factors heavily muddy the statistical waters of even a metric like this, which again, I think is a useful one. At MTCA, we see a statistically significant amount of the back end of things, which allows us a nice window into which schools offer approximately how many spots, and how they use their waitlist, at least in that given academic year, since it can change year to year with different program heads. But we don't always have the key data point of how many students apply each year to each program for the denominator, unless they're kind enough to proffer it up on the podcast.

So on our end, there is unquestionably a bit of guesswork and that beautiful word subjectivity that comes with where we draw our lines in categorizing schools. And there's also the factor of academics that come into play, which makes it a bit harder to judge a school's artistic competitiveness, since more people will opt themselves out of an academically rigorous school like USC, compared to a less academic environment like Boston Conservatory. So this makes it all the harder to parse out an exact artistic competitiveness. We do give you general groupings and likely have more data collected ourselves across the landscape than any other single entity I can think of. But even if we try to publish, these are the top 20 most artistically competitive schools in an exact order, we know it wouldn't be accurate.

Bullet point number three, personalization, which leads me to the last bullet point in why these lists can be deceiving, in that it won't be personalized to you. There's absolutely value in the wisdom of the crowds, but it's only truly helpful if you're talking about a crowd. You aren't a crowds person, you are a unique individual. And that's true in terms of all the kinds of softer ways that make you special, which you all are out there. But even before we get to that, let's talk about some of the harder ways in which these lists can lump things together. For instance, a lot of these lists will say something like the best 25 drama schools of 2025, right? That certainly makes sense because it appeals to the broad swath of people who are interested in the performing arts, but you're also lumping together a lot of different majors.

Some programs will have many different majors under one umbrella, and some will only speak toward one or two. For instance, Juilliard is a well-respected drama school that will be on top of a lot of these lists, and they have both a BFA and an MFA in acting, as well as a BM in voice, but not a degree in musical theater. Now, does that mean you can't be an amazing musical theater performer after going to Juilliard? Of course not. Think of all the examples we've had on the podcast that have done just that. But you certainly aren't comparing apples to apples if you're comparing the musical theater training at Juilliard to the musical theater training at CCM. And I like using Juilliard as an example there because it both has the acting versus MT distinction and also the grad versus undergrad distinction.

Most of these lists will not distinguish between the two, but of course, there's a big difference. Some of the schools on these lists have both available, whether it's like Juilliard in a combined class, which is really unique, or NYU, which has two very different experiences between the BFAs and MFAs. Others will only have an MFA program, like Yale or Columbia, where their undergrad programs would be like BA theater majors. And this is before you get into international schools, which are often mixed into these lists and might offer a unique degree, like a BA alms. Now, the other big aspect of personalization, which might be relevant for you, would be about artistic focus. This could be because you love acting, but really mostly want to be on camera or because you want intense classical training to be able to make a life doing Shakespeare all day.

Or within the musical theater, it's even more disparate, right? There are BFAs and BMs in musical theater that might focus especially on the voice or have a heavy concentration in dance. If you're comparing Roosevelt's musical theater dance degree to a graduate acting degree, now you're really comparing apples to kumquats. And that's without getting in degrees that might be specific to dance or vocal performance or other fields related to the performing arts. Okay, just so I don't spend the whole holiday blog giving you nothing but bah humbug on how these lists don't work, let's do a bit of what might make a school a top school for you. Now, certainly our MTC-ers will have heard Leo talk about his three Cs of curriculum, cost, and compatibility.

I would add to those ideas, the idea of really investigating yourself and what you think you're looking for in a school experience as early on as you can in the process. Wherever you are in the process, it's helpful to do that investigation, but I think if you can do it on the front end, it'll be helpful in both list construction and in how you approach the application and audition process as well. What might that mean for you? Aside from the big academic and artistic questions that we've discussed before, check out previous blogs and podcasts for discussions on BFA conservatories versus BFA liberal arts or audition-based BAs, as well as all these questions of artistic fit. One of the big questions you can investigate in the idea of what is quote-unquote top is what competitive level is going to feel right for you.

Just because a school might be harder to get into doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be better for you. It's something my wife and I are wrestling with as we look at quote-unquote gifted and talented programs in New York City for our kindergartner. Is being accelerated necessarily better for my daughter? What will be most conducive to her learning? We've discussed this before, but in my opinion, the professors at so many of these programs are truly excellent. I know amazing people who teach at the most competitive programs, and I know amazing people who teach at smaller emerging programs, and I would not say there's a qualitative difference between the two populations from the perspective of an educator.

Now that's not to say professors at all these schools are identical, because of course they're not, but I think when you talk about the different level of classes, it's less a difference between the quality of the educator than it is about the level of the peers you're going to be surrounded by. Now if we take, for example, my dear friend, long-time MTCA coach and former podcast guest Ryan Quinn, he has taught at Carnegie Mellon, Fordham, NYU, and Pace, all most competitive programs, and now he's helping spearhead the program at SUNY New Paltz. Is he any less an amazing educator when he's at New Paltz than when he's at one of the most competitive schools? Of course not, right? The same way your AP calculus teacher in high school may also be teaching algebra run, it'll be the same teacher, but it'll be a very different class.

The same is true for what you might see anytime you see a class like acting one when you're comparing curricula. But does this mean every student would benefit from the most advanced acting class available? It's up to you to decide what you actually want for yourself and where you think you will learn the most. You will continue to ask yourself these big school list questions about your own list as you go through the process, and you likely won't be able to fully answer questions like individual artistic fit until you've been in the room with those actual human beings. A podcast can help, but it is still not the same. I'll add that depending on your financial situation, cost can and absolutely should be a large factor in what makes school quote-unquote top for you.

If all else is going to be relatively similar and one school is going to leave you significantly in debt and another won't, that would certainly make one much more top on my personal list. Now, can you tell that I'm someone who's applying to kindergartens in New York City with both free public schools and outlandishly expensive private school at the same time? I am. As you're investigating what you're looking for in a school, I also think it's helpful for you to take a second and try to define what metric you wish we had that we don't for what would make a school quote-unquote top for you. If we had something like percentage of students who reported satisfaction and happiness in their careers and lives after graduating, that would be pretty great, wouldn't it?

I certainly would like that as a parent, right? I would want to know what's going to make her happy and successful, but even taking that moment to think about what happiness and success might look like and feel like for you is helpful, I think. You might learn something about yourself when you pause to let yourself dream, and I always say it is really helpful to have that strong motivational fire of a specific dream, even if you know it will shift over time. If nothing else, it will help you avoid getting bogged down in the minutiae of the day-to-day drudgery of this process and remember what it is all purportedly for. In conclusion, I do really understand why people crave these lists and even how they can be useful to someone who's just starting out, especially if you're starting from scratch.

Especially if you took every list made in the last 25 years and you rank their aggregated totals, you would glean something useful from a general sense of how people think about these schools. You have to factor out some of the statistical noise that we discussed above, but I don't deny you would gain something from it, and I also think there is a value in knowing a general sense of how a school is thought of in the world, especially in a subjective field where so little is numerical. It's comforting to have some sort of guide there. However, as I'm sure you will sense if you've gotten this far in this blog and or know anything about MTCA's philosophy, the caution is really against using these as anything more than a single flawed data point.

As a general sense of the specific question of how a school might be thought of, I'm all for it, but when you start using a list like this to say, ah, so school X is fourth and school Y is twelfth, that's where you get yourself into trouble. Maybe for this holiday season it would be better if we left all the definitive, ultimate, universal list making to Santa. All right, that's it. I hope you're all having a wonderful holiday break as you listen to this wherever and whenever you do so and that you have an amazing new year. We'll be back next week with one of our normal episodes. To our seniors, please use this time to rest and recover and come back in fighting shape for your prime audition season.

Here we go. And while you're resting, make sure you've liked and subscribed to this very podcast wherever you listen, wherever you watch, and you can even subscribe to our sub stack if you love the blog life. For those who are more into bite-sized media, you know we've got our Instagram at Mocking the College Edition, and check us out at mtca.com for all things college prep related for your own individual process. I'm calling it here, folks. My new year's resolution is you're going to get a cute podcast directory in 2026. We've already begun the ugly version, but it's gonna be cute. To my young artists out there mapping their journeys, please trust that you're enough for the right program, whether it's quote-unquote top or not, exactly as you are right now. Now keep striving. We'll catch you next week.