A BA in Liberal Arts or a BFA in Acting is a colossal waste of money. These degrees are consistently ranked as two of the lowest paying degrees in the United States. As the Artistic Director & Master Teacher of the Maggie Flanigan Studio in NYC, I have been training actors for two decades at our NYC acting studio. I have taught hundreds of aspiring actors who train with me after receiving their college degree. I have also taught hundreds of undergraduate students in our six-week summer Meisner Intensive who are in the middle of their college years, and come to NYC for a summer of high-level professional training.  A fair number of summer students are NYU Tisch undergraduates who get shopped out to the various studio factories for their NYC acting classes. Across the board, when these students finally experience serious professional acting training, they are left with a profound existential crisis. They come to realize that the training they are receiving in college is a joke. They have uninspired teachers who tell everyone they’re doing a good job, they tolerate laziness, a lack of effort, and often accept the bare minimum necessary to receive a passing grade. All of this for the privilege of paying $50,000 to $80,000 a year. For those of you who want to seriously pursue a professional acting career, the best training is not at the undergraduate level. That’s not to say that the college system doesn’t have incredible teachers who have dedicated their life to the art of teaching. I am still in close contact with my first acting teacher from my undergrad, and he has been an important mentor to me for that last thirty-six years. But those special mentors are rare. The college system is a continual conveyor belt of teenagers who are thrown into overcrowded classrooms with mediocre instructors, in theater programs with no clear pedagogical cohesion, vision, or standards. Basically, you are paying $250,000 for a general theater appreciation degree. You learn a little bit about a lot of different things, but end up having no clue how to act.

My summer acting program students who sit in my office after six weeks all have the same conversation with me. “I wish I could quit school and just train here.” “I’ve learned more in six-weeks than I have in three years of college.” “I don’t want to go back, but I have no choice, my parents want me to finish.”  It’s baked into the collective consciousness that the only way to succeed in life is to go to college. I get it. I received my BA in Theater from Purdue University in 1992. I racked up $50,000 in student debt, and moved to NYC in 1993 to pursue my acting career, thinking to myself “I got my degree, I’m trained, I know what I’m doing, I’m ready for a professional career!”  I ended up doing what the majority of aspiring actors do when they move to New York. I got a survival job waiting tables and bartending, typed up a resume, got my headshots, and started looking through Backstage. This was at a time when Backstage was still a weekly newspaper which came out every Thursday. I would sift through the casting notices, put my pic/resume in a manilla folder and drop it in the mail! I spent five years taking various acting classes in NYC, cobbling together a hodge-podge of acting classes from monologue work, to scene study. I did free theater in small downtown black boxes, and awful graduate student films.   After five years I finally realized I still didn’t know how the hell to consistently create vivid human behavior, that my college training was not nearly enough. I had no process, and so I made the decision to audition for grad schools. I was accepted to a few, and chose Rutgers Mason Gross School of the Arts in 1998, where I studied under Bill Esper and Maggie Flanigan. They were the two greatest Meisner Technique teachers in the United States, and I knew that’s what I wanted.  I received my MFA in Acting in 2001, and it set me on a course that has been incredibly rewarding. I also added another $60,000 in student loans to my college debt. So, to get the training I ultimately needed, it took me 13 years, two degrees, and a total of $120,000 in student loan debt. If I knew then what I knew now, I would have moved to New York at 18, enrolled in a serious two-year NYC acting studio where I could have still studied under Maggie Flanigan, and received the best training possible for roughly $15,000. Option two, (if I had to appease my parents) would have been to get a degree in business administration, finance, history, or even psychology, with a minor in Spanish, and learn about something that would really broaden my education, especially since I knew that I was ultimately going to move to New York to pursue acting. I would have arrived at 21 ready to get into a Meisner Technique class.

Now, I don’t tell my summer session students to drop out of college, that is not my place. But I do help talk them through the reality of what it takes to become a well-trained actor, and what they will face after they receive their undergraduate degree. The decision to move to NYC or LA, getting a place to live, a job, establishing a solid foundation are all crucial. Then the question is, what next? The mistake most aspiring actors make is cobbling together a mix of classes, thinking that on-camera and scene study classes are going to teach them how to act. They don’t. Acting is an art form, and it requires craft and technique in order to be consistent and vivid. Most young actors don’t even understand the need for professional training. I certainly didn’t. I thought my BA in theater was enough. I was so incredibly naïve. I was still operating in what Malcolm Gladwell refers to as unconscious incompetence. I didn’t even realize how ignorant I was about pursuing an acting career.

When you enter the professional world, the only thing that matters is whether you can create behavior or not. That is the actor’s job. Is your work interesting? Is it vivid? Is it spontaneous and emotionally nuanced? And can you do that kind of high-level work consistently? There are a handful of MFA programs and NYC acting studio’s that have a well-earned reputation of putting out the best trained actors in the United States. No one in the business is going to look at your resume and see your BA from Ohio State, or your BFA from Boston College and give two shits. Now, if you have an MFA from Julliard, NYU, or Yale, that’s different. But getting into those schools is as easy as finding a needle in a haystack. Do you know how to work? Can you take adjustments in the room? Do you have an actual process for how to step into the shoes of another human being? Do you have a physical and vocal instrument that has range and dimension? Can you be transformational in your work? This level of acting takes incredible skill and craft. You are not going to learn how to do this in an undergraduate program, and anyone that tells you otherwise is being disingenuous.

It’s also hard at 18 or 19 years old to really know what’s the best way to proceed. Not wanting to go to college often engenders the same look as a woman saying she doesn’t want to have kids. People don’t get it. Not go to college? Are you crazy? You’ll be working at car wash when your 40! The most important thing to realize is that acting is an art form and that to be really good, you need to have a solid way of working. Be an actor that can do anything; theater, television, or film. And realize that if you want to be an artist of consequence, master your instrument and develop your voice, your body, your temperament, and your imagination. This will require a healthy dose of obsession, and a rock-solid work ethic. Most actors are lazy. Most actors are hacks that have no concept of artistry. If you are someone who understands this, you are already ahead of the majority of aspiring actors.

So, should you waste your time on a BA or BFA in the arts? In my opinion, no way. If you are committed to the college experience, and need a degree to appease your parents, study something that has real life value. A degree that can feed your intellectual curiosity, a field of study that can broaden your understanding of the world, and expand your appreciation of the human experience. You can graduate at 21 or 22, and then put your attention and energy to finding the top acting studios in the country. I have lived and taught in both LA and NYC, and there is no doubt in my mind that the best acting training is in NYC. I also believe that the Meisner Technique is the best way to train an actor, to instill the important fundamentals needed to be consistently good. You can visit NYC acting studios, interview with master teachers, and find an artistic home for two to three years. It will cost a small fraction of the price of a college degree. At the Maggie Flanigan Studio, the standards are incredibly high. Every student who is accepted has interviewed with me personally, and they each have an innate understanding of the importance of artistry and craft. They want to be challenged, they want to be taught, they want to be held to professional level expectations when it comes to how they conduct themselves. My last bit of advice is to enroll in an acting program that has a developed conservatory approach to acting training. Make sure that any NYC acting studio you look at is dedicated to developing a complete artist. A professional acting career is not a guarantee. It will cost you a great deal, and require a dedication and commitment to yourself and to the artist you strive to be.