The Definitive, Ultimate, Universal “TOP TEN” list of Acting + 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 TEN” list of Acting + 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-and-cheek. But here’s the important truth that we tell all 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 “top” for YOU.

Let’s talk about why these lists are all flawed by their nature…

• Subjectivity: This is probably the most obvious flaw to many of you, but it’s where we have to start whenever you talk about these kinds 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 are written by someone who attended one of these schools, sometimes a writer compiling from different sources (though rarely using any statistical data). I’ve seen schoolmates of mine write one, and 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 have likely attended one or maybe two of these schools themselves) and the experiences of their close friends and colleagues. For what it’s worth, I do tend to prefer those lists in terms of a final product to the more aggregated lists created by non-performers, but of course that is MY subjective opinion as someone who attended one of these 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 will 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 isn’t 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 the logical, analytical folks out there (you’ll 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, 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. 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 is not a random process on the student acceptance end (EX: We do see students who we could say with a high-level of confidence they will do extremely well in the process and they DO extremely well in the process, predictably), the subjectivity is not completely random on the “Top” lists either. 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 5 that doesn’t make another person’s list at all. This wouldn’t happen to this extreme if you compared various schools for their rankings in Computer Science. 

• Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics: Okay, sticking with the delicious fodder for our stat-nerds out there, this is probably the most important bit of information I can relay to you today. You ready? There are just no quality, useful, objective metrics that are tracked and then appropriately statistically weighted so that you could get a numerical “score” for schools if you wanted one.

Let’s take for example what is probably the closest thing to an objective metric that you have available to you in some of these lists, which is representation on Broadway. First off, I would quibble with that as a true metric for success, since it is 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). And it’s also probably not correct to count all Broadway shows as exactly equal – surely originating the lead in a new Broadway show with a Tony nomination might count as a different experience than booking the ensemble in Wicked? Both huge accomplishments, but I would argue they are different.

If you were to start tracking a brand new program graduating its first class of 12 MTs versus the 12 MTs that Carnegie Mellon graduates, you might think that’s apples-to-apples, 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

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 50-60 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 lists (I’m thinking specifically of the Playbill ones, which I like that they provide for you cleanly!), they are lumping together MTs, Actors, and Grad Students all into one big pile. So 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 MTs a year. And that same numerical advantage is magnified when you factor that some schools have been around over a hundred years, while others are just starting today. If you were to start tracking a brand new program graduating its first class of 12 MTs versus the 12 MTs that Carnegie Mellon graduates, you might think that’s apples-to-apples, 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. Maybe let’s be fair and cut that in half as I don’t think a lot of people who graduated drama school in the 40s are still out there working. But when you consider people you’re including people like Cherry Jones and Ted Danson who are in their 70s, it’s not exactly a fair playing field, numerically. And if you’ve been paying attention to the above, you’ll also know you have to double my number of 12 a year when you’re talking about Carnegie Mellon, 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 weighting for total students (per year and over the many years) the raw total numbers are really deceiving. And that’s before you burrow deeper on the question of what is actually most relevant to you at the decision-making level and get a bit nerdier (trying to tease out the 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”. As we’ve talked about here 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 down to a decision-making point for yourself, that has already been accounted for. You’ve already gotten into Michigan, now what? Do the schools make the student or do the students make the school? Obviously a bit of both, but I think way more of the latter than the general public thinks on the front end of the process.

And that’s just one very quick breakdown of how a seemingly objective metric falls apart under the scrutiny of someone who has taken only a high-school level statistics class. 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. 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 successfully weight the success of a big movie over a short-running regional theater contract, but I think probably would 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. 

One of the closest metrics to this which I think could have some relevance to you, and which is not tracked across schools but some schools will talk about, is “percentage of their class signed to representation after showcase”. I think this is a cool and flashy stat when schools talk about it, and I understand hearing it and getting excited, since certainly plenty of schools will have showcases that might not yield huge results for a large percentage of their students. But I just want to add a bit of caution to the idea of what “signed with an agency” might mean. For those who don’t know this business well, there are all different “tiers” of agencies. I won’t go deep on it here, since it could be a whole other blog post, but the difference between a huge corporate agency like CAA or WME and the smallest agencies is as different as the difference between the NBA and playing for you local recreational basketball league which might have a financial prize at the end. 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 only going up for huge projects against established movie stars), but even taking those away and just talking about the difference between a Mid-Size and a Boutique agency is significant. Those can both be excellent paths for a young actor starting out and in their early career. 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 “factory agencies”), which can have inherent in their nature a bit of a scammy feel. They might have many hundreds of clients per agent that they are sending out en masse and hoping that one of them books 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. That’s not to say that many young actors might not start at an agency like this and be successful, but it is worth noting the difference when a school is taking credit for “everyone here signed” or even “over half of our class signed” of whether they are talking about signing to agencies that are very selective with their incoming clients or not.

Some schools publish all of their numbers openly and some will use different numbers differently

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 schools incoming yield? How hard is it to get into? 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’ll 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 – the idea that in the long run, Vegas is usually right, because if they are wrong somebody is likely making money off of it, and people are smart! 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 towards this particular metric because we use a version of this in helping our students find competitive balance in their list, and we think it is 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 of their numbers openly 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. You’ll hear it happen on the podcast when I ask schools about it – some will say “We take an incoming class of 24, and we have 1500 people apply – so what’s that, a 1.5% acceptance rate?”. And on some level, sure, that’s true! But while some schools may accept 24 with a small waitlist to yield 24, others schools 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. 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 an 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 backend of things, which allows us a nice window into which schools offer approximately how many spots and how they use their waitlists (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 are 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 is also the factor of Academics that comes into play, which makes it a bit harder to judge a schools 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 if we tried to publish “these are the top 20 most artistically competitive schools” in an exact order, we know it wouldn’t be accurate.

• Personalization: Which leads me to the last bullet point in why these lists can be deceiving, is that they won’t be personalized to YOU. There is 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 crowdsperson, you are a unique individual. And that’s true in terms of all kinds of softer ways that make you special (which you all are!), 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”. That certainly makes sense to appeal to the broad swath of people who are interested in the performing arts – but you’re also lumping a lot of different majors together. 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 the 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. Does that mean you can’t be an amazing Musical Theater performer after going to Juilliard? Of course not – think of all of the examples we’ve had on the podcast that have done just that, but you certainly aren’t comparing apples-to-apples if you are 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 has both the Acting vs. MT distinction, and also the Grad vs. Undergrad distinction. Most of these lists will not distinguish between the two, but of course there is a big difference. Some of the schools on these lists have both available, whether it’s like Juilliard in a combined class (which is 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, whereas their undergrad programs would be 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-Hons.  

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 that is even more disparate – there are BFAs and BMs in Musical Theater that might focus especially on the Voice or have a heavy concentration in Dance. Comparing Roosevelt’s “Musical Theater Dance” degree to a Graduate Acting degree is really comparing Apples to Kumquats. And that’s without getting into degrees that might specifically be in 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. Certainly our MTCAers will have heard Leo talk about his three “C”s of Curriculum, Cost and Compatibility. I would add to those the idea of really investigating yourself and what you think you are looking for from 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 will really be helpful in both list construction and in how you approach the application and audition process as well.

one of the big questions you can investigate in the idea of what is “top” is what competitive level is going to feel right for you

What might this mean for you? Aside from the big Academic and Artistic questions we’ve discussed before (check out previous blogs for discussions on BFA Conservatories vs. BFA Liberal Arts vs. Audition-Based BAs as well as questions of Artistic Fit), one of the big questions you can investigate in the idea of what is “top” is what competitive level is going to feel right for you. Just because a school might be harder to get into doesn’t mean it’s necessarily going to be better for you. This is something my wife and I are wrestling with as we look at “Gifted and Talented” programs in NYC for our Kindergartener. 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 who teach at smaller Emerging Programs and I would not say there is qualitative difference between the two populations, from the perspective of an Educator. That’s not to say all professors at all schools are all identical, because of course they are not, but I think when you talk about the level of different classes, it’s less of a difference between the quality of the educator than it is about the level of the peers you’ll be surrounding yourself with. If we take for example, my dear friend, longtime MTCA coach and former podcast guest Ryan Quinn: He has taught at Carnegie Mellon, Fordham, NYU and PACE – all most competitive programs. Now he is helping spearhead the program at SUNY New Paltz. Is he any less amazing an educator when he is at New Paltz than he is when he is at one of those Most Competitive schools? Of course not. The same way your AP Calculus teacher in high school may also be teaching Algebra I– it will be the same teacher, but it will be a very different class. The same is true for what you might see anytime you see a class like “Acting I” when you’re comparing curricula. But does that 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 those 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 (the podcast can help, but it’s 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 a school “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! (Can you tell that I am someone who is applying to Kindergartens in NYC with both Free Public Schools and Outlandishly Expensive Private Schools at the same time?) 

You might learn something about yourself when you pause to let yourself dream

As you are investigating what you are looking for in a school, I also think it is 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 “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! But even taking that moment to think about what that happiness and success might look 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’s 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 is just starting out, and is starting from scratch. Especially if you took every list made in the last 25 years and you ranked their aggregated totals, you would glean something useful from a general sense of how people think about these schools. You would have to factor out some of the statistic “noise” discussed above, but I don’t deny that 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 our MTCA philosophy, the caution is really against using these as anything more than a single, flawed data point. As a general sense of that 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 4th and School Y is 12th” that’s where you can get yourself in a lot of trouble. 

Maybe for this holiday season, it would be better if we left all the Definitive, Ultimate, Universal list making to Santa.

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