Not to put a damper on the holiday spirit, but I've been thinking a lot lately about paying for college. Here is a link to a sobering article about student debt and theatre majors. It's not all gloom and doom, but it does spotlight the difficulty of launching a career in a hugely competitive field while also struggling with debt repayment. The comments at the end of the article (which is about a year old) are particularly insightful. A couple of them speak to the vast number of schools churning out theatre and MT BFAs each year, when only a tiny percentage of graduates continue on to successful performance careers. While we are all feeling right now that entry into the programs is staggeringly competitive, it is even scarier to think of what happens at the other end of the tunnel. Here is the link:
http://www.tcg.org/publications/at/issue/featuredstory.cfm?story=7&indexID=45
As you are looking over your audition list this holiday, I encourage you to think long and hard about the cost of each program and how your family is going to come up with the necessary funds. It's easy to hope that in addition to winning admission, your kid is going to get great scholarship offers. But the fact is that colleges, despite their not-for-profit status, run as businesses, with a primary motive of maximizing tuition revenue. It's so easy to get carried away by the "branding" of top schools, especially those that tout successful agent/job placements and alumni networks. Remember, too, that there is no school that can promise to make your kid a star or even increase the odds of that happening.
17 year old kids do not understand money, either in a theoretical or a practical sense. They just don't. They don't know that a student loan of just $6000 a year or $24000 over four years can balloon to twice that size over a surprisingly short period of time if even one missed payment escalates their interest payments. Even if they can get their dream-filled heads around the problem, they still won't accept that long-term, career-crippling student debt might happen to them. There are dozens of horror stories on youtube, where adults earning as little as $15 an hour at age 30 are still facing $100,000 or more of college debt for bachelor's degrees they've never been able to use. As your child's advocate, I encourage you to start researching now and figure out how tuition will be paid. If worst comes to worst and there are no scholarships, where is the money going to come from? While dreaming of the big-name schools and full scholarships, take time out to plan for alternate options, such as staying in-state or going to a less glamorous school with better funding. Look beyond the CC school list to colleges in your back yard that offer great merit awards. Look at the syllabus for MT and you'll likely find it is remarkably similar to the big schools. With the money you save, you could pay for extra outside classes, trips to NY for masterclasses, summer coaching, etc. to bolster your kid's training.
So far, with one kid a college junior, our family has been fortunate to avoid student loans. It has taken huge modifications in our lifestyle to do that. Over the last four years we've cut back on everything--no trips, very few nights out or new clothes for parents, no cable, no new gadgets, cheap phones, no home-decorating or landscaping service, lots of rice & beans, part-time jobs for kids whenever possible. We'll need to cut back further for our MT kid next year, hoping to maintain that "no college debt" goal. It's hard, but I'd rather wear older clothes and eat beans than have my kids start out life with a boatload of debt.
Sorry for the long rant! I know how I get caught up in the excitement of great schools, but I think it is wise to add a couple of low-cost options, just in case.
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