The Audition Question 2021 Version

Ever since I opened The MTA back in 2009 there's always been a rumbling of grievance around the fact that drama colleges charge for auditions. It's one of the regular 'hot topics' that pop up from time to time.

Before I opened the college I remember reading somewhat aghast as one of the main drama colleges unwittingly (I suspect) informed the members of The Stage Forum that it auditioned X amount of students/year, leading a whole load of us to do the sums. They easily made in excess of £105K/year in audition fees alone. 

If you're unfamiliar with the drama school/conservatoire model you pay for the privilege of getting seen, and probably rejected (as the odds are really stacked against the majority of people due to (back then) the numbers of students that they could accept/year). Auditions back then varied from £25-£75, plus you have to factor in travel expenses, possibly overnight accommodation etc. Now if you're getting an amazing workshop for that money maybe you could argue a case for the cost - but at some colleges, applicants are getting 10mins of somebody's time, at other colleges applicants get cut before being able to show the panels their full skillset, at some colleges you're seen in groups of over 100 people! Years later I discovered that at some colleges if you were successful during their first-round you were gifted the right to pay some more to get your next round audition?

I'm not blameless, we charged a nominal fee for years, as at first it was felt that if we charged nothing we would be underselling our course, so in order to 'fit in' we should value ourselves with a fee in order for people to take us seriously.

We often spoke about scrapping it, but as our policy was to only audition a small number of people each day we were despairing with the number of no-shows, so we not only kept the fee but increased it in order to deter people from wasting our audition places.  Yet still, we discussed it as it just didn't really fit with what we wanted to represent.

Susan Elkin from The Stage used to regularly call this out, and indeed I had many a conversation with her as I grappled with how we could manage the no shows whilst still placing a value on the course. I salved my own conscience by proudly seeing on every single anonymous feedback form since we opened that applicants felt that we had given them value for money. We had spent the day with them, we knew their names, we had workshopped, we had chatted, we had attempted to be helpful whatever the outcome was, and we would always give each applicant written feedback. We only have one round, but then we only audition a maximum of 15 on any one day, so we got the opportunity to see everything that we needed to see on that day, thereby minimizing the cost of a recall. 

Then back in 2017, we introduced #auditionfromhome. A self-tape first round really. Applicants could send us their self-tape and we'd advise them whether we thought that we'd a good fit for each other just based on the skill set. It meant that we were able to save people the additional expense of travel and accommodation if it was clear from the tape that we wouldn't be the best college for them. Interestingly when The Stage ran our press release I had a bit of flack on the old Twitter - people calling us out for making it too easy for applicants, "audition from home" they said, "how lazy". Ironic right now don't you think?

Whilst this certainly saved people some money it still didn't fit well with me.  As I bang on and on about I'm from a council estate in Swansea. My family would not have been able to afford for me to apply for lots of colleges, yet here I was - suddenly on the side of the establishment all because we couldn't grapple enough with how to solve the problem of how to place value on our time (even though the applicant's time was valuable too), and how to stop the annoying no-shows, leaving people waiting longer than they needed to in order to audition for us. I mean it was all rather arse about tit, wasn't it? 

So eventually we scrapped our fee. The compromise was to ask people to pay a refundable deposit in order to secure their place. They'd get it back if they turned up for the audition. We kept the day the same, a whole day audition like we'd done from the beginning, no cuts throughout the day, feedback to all applicants, we also threw in some comp tickets to watch one of our shows if applicants wanted to see us in action. Our audition panel was the same as when we started - the senior faculty. The people that the applicants would work with if they'd been successful.

When the pandemic hit we (like the rest of the world) moved straight to zoom. In fact, we were the first drama college to move our auditions to zoom. Obviously, that was just timing as opposed to us attempting to be a 'first', we already had auditions booked in for the first week of lockdown. We had a few practice runs at it and found a way that we felt worked for us, and hoped that it would work for the applicants.

In truth, we were shocked. The interactive online audition told us everything that we needed to know, and seemingly the applicants were leaving satisfied too. We'd changed the day to a half-day in order to avoid zoom fatigue, and we stopped the feedback as by moving it online we committed to only seeing 6-7 students at a time.  

The zoom auditions worked so well we announced back in August 2020 that we would be keeping them post-pandemic. It was a great way to see people without them having to pay a penny (other than the refundable deposit). Finally, it had all fallen into place. We started this academic year giving students the option of a half-day virtual audition or a whole day in-person audition, and that's the way that it's going to stay now I think. I mean who knows what will be thrown at us next. Having recently been bought an Oculus it's not that hard to envisage a VR audition room within the next few years, and I can't wait to embrace it (if only because I love a gadget).

Our auditions cost us money, I have to pay for staff to be in the room, not all of them are on salaries, and even for those that are, I need to pay for staff to cover their classes that day. We lose the potential of a room hire in the audition space - a much-missed source of income at the moment, as it's those rehearsal room hires that pay into our Hardship Fund. The admin takes time, and of course in business time always equates to cost. However, it is our cost to absorb. I got that wrong in the beginning. I just wanted to 'fit into the establishment'. For those of you that have followed The MTA's journey, you'll know how dumb that thought was given that we are forever the course on the outside of the establishment, doing things our way, from the 2 year model to a whole school approach to mental health.

Of course, what's prompted this blog is the social media call to arms to abolish audition fees at a time when a lot of colleges are just doing self-tapes. The irony of somebody calling this out as wrong whilst simultaneously starting a Go Fund Me in order to help people who are financially struggling sums up the disconnect in our industry. 

We shout about what's not right, we celebrate and indeed laud any of the established colleges that knock a couple of quid off their audition fees in the name of 'opening up the room', yet fail to see the systemic failure in the way that we operate. 

Next time you're at an audition, or indeed sat in a lecture theatre on the first day of your course, or see a college online telling you how 'lucky' you are to be offered a place because they've auditioned thousands of people - do the math.  Due to how many people we'd audition on one day we never made money on our auditions. I'm not that sure how many other colleges can say the same with their hand on their heart.

Auditions should be free. . . we got it wrong for really poor reasons actually, however, we've corrected it. Maybe the rest should too, and maybe if you're advocating for a charity or fundraiser trying to help the underprivileged pay those fees, you're inadvertently endorsing the business model.

The Audition Issue

Seeing as WestEndProducer has raised the important question of audition fees one more time, and given that this was one of my blog areas the other day....here's the deal with drama college/uni auditions...as I see it.

When you go to the doctors, 9 out of 10 people don't feel 'better' unless they give you a tablet. We feel short changed when they say the word virus, and say that antibiotics won't help us out.  We would feel ripped off if on top of that they had charged us between £30-£75 for the privilege of hearing this information even though the facts were correct. 

The question is (unless I'm very much mistaken) - is the audition process a cash cow for colleges? Everybody gets cross at the question, all standing their ground that their audition process is not only fair, but very often it's a loss maker. We could probably 'chose' our students in half a day if we crammed things in, but you'd definitely feel that you hadn't been seen or heard - so we've always opted for a whole day audition process with no cuts. I can tell if you can sing by hearing 16 bars. . . but you feel like you need to sing your entire rep. . . so we compromise on one time limited song.

Now I run a teeny, tiny college.  Here are my facts:

We audition up to 15 people in a session.  We only do whole day auditions. Throughout the day they will have my senior faculty with them at all times, plus one of my dance staff for an hour and a half. Clearly we need a studio to facilitate this day.  Part of our revenue relies on the hire of our one free studio space in the day - just a quick google check and you'll see that our one day studio hire is £140/day (for our audition studio...although we do sometimes vary it, depending on the needs of the course)
So we've potentially lost that revenue for that day...and therefore have to count it as a 'cost'.  It usually costs us around £40 to have one member of my dance staff with us for a dance workshop...so we're already 'down' £180.  Whilst the staff that are in the room are my salaried staff, that does 'lose' me a day of their contract elsewhere, so budget wise I have to factor it in.  All the staff are on different salaries and on different point scales, however roughly speaking that would mean that each member of staff costs me around £120....and there are 4 of us in the room.  So our audition day costs us £570...to do the paperwork around each audition is probably around 2 hours per audition day, in addition we send all applicants written feedback which takes a further 2 hours at the end of the day. If we say that each hour of admin is £15 - we're on £60 admin charge/day.

So we have 15 people paying £45 - giving us a total of £675/audition day.
So it's room hire £140 (or more accurately, loss of earnings for that room)
Staff costs at £520
Admin costs at £60
Total cost to us - £720
So as I've always maintained...we run all of our audition days at a loss.

In reality we lose a bit more than that though, as our classes all have to be covered by our freelance teachers - so as a business we have an additional £330(minimum) to 'cover' too. However it's imperative to me that the audition panel consists of the very people who are going to have to get you industry ready in 2 years, I don't buy into the 'guest' system of auditioning. I need my staff to see if they can solve your bad habits.

In other words. . . I can justify the cost of my audition day without any difficulty.  It's for you to do the sums everywhere else...or even better for every college to break it down to show complete transparency over costs.

This does not make your audition day any cheaper BUT we're on our 9th year of auditioning now, and at the end of every session we have asked every applicant to anonymously fill out a questionnaire to ensure that they feel like they've had value for money from their day with us.  100% of applicants have not only felt like they've received the value of their audition fee, but every year around 30% say that they feel like we're under selling our day! 100% of them would recommend our audition day to their friends.

We cap our audition numbers, as we are simply looking for the 22 people to fill our course, and we fill as we go along. Our applicants find out that evening if they've been accepted or not.

However we're equally unhappy about 'the system'. We advise people to apply early to us due to the fact that we fill as we go along. . . and yet every year a percentage of students will come to an early audition, we'll offer them a place and of course, they want to go and see everywhere else before committing to us.  So to us they've wasted one of our valuable audition spaces, but also it's really disappointing when we invest so much into people on our audition days when they then turn around and say that they can't decide yet (even though we make it blatantly obvious everywhere that you will only have a 2 week period to decide on accepting that place or not. . .AND explain the reasons for that), so they end up turning down the place.  This is very different, I'll add, to the people that are clear that it's just the wrong course for them (which of course they wouldn't have found out unless they had done our audition day. . . so I'd say for them and us, that was still a day well spent). FYI there is only a short 2 week deciding time as we need to know how many places we have to offer by the next audition day, and as the applications keep coming in, as we would stop our audition process early. We also deliberately put a large deposit request in, as we don't like the game of 'holding security places'. We only want you to pay a deposit if you're coming to train with us...if  you're sure that we're the right place for you.

Interestingly as we're one of the few drama colleges that give feedback, I have a surprisingly large number of people that thank us for the feedback and inform us that they used it, and it facilitated them getting into another college! Again if we were seriously being considered as a training option but it wasn't right for them(or us)...that's bloody brilliant...and they definitely did receive value for money. however disappointing it might be for 'us'.

As nearly every applicant says on their feedback form, they like the fact that we get to know our applicants as people, with names, not commodities with numbers.  However that means (as our testimonials will vouch for us actually) that we clearly invest from day one. . . probably a bit too much if I'm honest.

I get that applying to loads of colleges is the advice that we all give...just applying to 10 would cost you around £450 these days(& I know that you have to add travel and accommodation on top of that...which is why we decide in a day, and refuse to do any recalls, which would cost you more money again)...and that's a big investment, for very little return. So I guess my advice would be chose your 10 carefully. . .  Find out exactly what you're getting for that money. It's only if you start deciding to give your money elsewhere will the colleges who are suspected of running cash cow auditions will change.

Should we audition around the country to lower your audition costs? I don't think that we can. We're a unique course, with a unique atmosphere. That atmosphere will instantly click with you, or instantly repel you I guess. . .but you'll only find that out by submerging yourself in our culture/habitat for the day.

And the bit about the doctor? Well sometimes you're just not right for a course, it doesn't matter what you do, you're not the right 'fit' for the college of your dreams. If they're honest with you and tell you that you will always feel ripped off. . . even if you come away empty handed because they want to actually save you money.

There's a herd of elephants in the room - and none of us are talking about them!

Once again the drama kicks off about 'poor people' AKA the working classes being given access to the arts, specifically training. A recent article in The Stage started yet another debate about the subject.  The hypothesis in the article was that however well meaning all the celebs were by speaking out about the 'crisis' they were, in fact helping to perpetuate the myth, therefore stopping the working classes giving it a go.

I have to say that this is 100% my experience. The amount of parents that contact me, telling me that they've researched training options and they've seen that so and so has said that it's too expensive.  It's only when they speak to me can we look at all the options available to them from the perspective of The MTA (obviously every college has their own criteria).  Now that said, I also once had a Principal of another college contact me, trying to convince me to take a student that we had turned down, and said at the end of the email that my other consideration should be that (and of course I'm paraphrasing here)  the family were loaded so I should take them anyway!!

I guess that last paragraph sums up the issue. There are colleges bending over backwards to facilitate students training with them, then there are 'businesses' just piling those fee paying students high and proud. The question is how do we ensure that talent is nurtured, as opposed to where do the pounds come from?

With the EU referendum looming, there is also the issue of colleges actively looking for overseas students. Now why is that do you think? Far be it for me to suggest that the financial premium that they're adding to these students has anything to do with the race to get some of them to train at UK establishments!  I'll quickly add that The MTA just charges everyone the same - it costs me the same to train them so I can't quite justify a price increase because they're moving countries to train!

The Stage article then, via FB comments, quickly shifted to the cost of just auditioning for drama colleges, and how that alone stops people applying.  Now this is definitely a subject to start jumping up and down about. Colleges are auditioning people in their thousands which clearly brings in a useful financial stream. How they can argue that they're losing money on a day when over 100 students are auditioning at one time I really don't know.

Each college has it's own system of auditioning, however I can't help thinking that it's not quite right to charge up to £80 to spend less than 30 mins in a room discussing a monologue? Or indeed if you're auditoning for a MT course why you couldn't at least have a stab at all 3 disciplines before they throw you out onto the pavement of despair.  I find it interesting hearing the stories of auditions, and how the students' experience of them defers from the website and indeed official line.

I think that the audition day charge SHOULD be capped. We charge £45, now that's for a full day (9 - 5...sometimes 6), we see them do all 3 disciplines, we give them written feedback at the end of the day, and make our decision that evening. They are then emailed the results, hopefully on the same evening (including the written feedback). They are auditioned by the entire senior faculty.  We've always given them a questionnaire to anonymously fill in at the end of the day, and one of the questions is 'do you feel like you've received value for money' and in 8 years 100% of them have said yes.  Quite a large percentage state that they feel like they should have paid more for the day! Our day has always run at a loss as we chose to audition in small numbers.

The problem here though are the elephants very clearly in the room ie we are training too many people for the industry, and more specifically some people are being trained purely because they can  pay (as demonstrated by the other college Principal). Colleges are increasing their intake, increasing their courses, and we are oversubscribed to the hilt. There are courses being run on something silly like 15 hours of contact time/week and their students think (and have been led to believe) that they're going to be 'industry ready' after that training.

Why are we seeing so many people coming through the door who have already trained? They've already paid £27,000 for their degree...and are now being forced to pay the same again to actually be trained for the industry that they wanted to be in?

Who is regulating this system? Can a university start any course it likes without someone actually checking the validity of the course?

Who is regulating the drama colleges? Drama UK aren't - they're busy in Asia last I heard, getting their 'brand awareness' up over there??

Everybody up in arms about stuff is sort of right....but in my humble opinion they're up in arms about the wrong stuff. There is a bigger picture here that's been well and truly lost.