Customer Reviews

Creative Colleges: A Guide for Student Actors, Artists, Dancers, Musicians, and Writers

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As if being a student in the college search and application process is not challenging enough, student actors, artists, dancers, and musicians are presented with additional and different sets of options and challenges. Creative Colleges: A Guide for Student Actors, Artists, Dancers, Musicians and Writers by Elaina Loveland is a great resource for creative students, the parents of creative students, and the counselors who work with creative students.

The information in Creative Colleges is clear, practical, well researched, and well presented. Students will get help with decision-making and advice on applications, auditions, portfolios, essays, resumes, and other aspects of the process. They will also get a feel of what different colleges are like.

Much of the tips and advice is quoted directly from admissions professionals, professors at creative colleges, and from creative students who went through the college search and admission process.

The author is a former editor of the Journal of College Admission. In Creative Colleges, she combines that experience with her background as a writing student and writer and her experiences as a dance student and dancer. The author's experience and empathy for and understanding of the creative student are evident throughout the book.

Creative Colleges is a book that can be a great help every to every high school junior and senior who wants to pursue acting, art, dance, music, and writing at the college level.

This reference book helps in choosing creative type colleges or conservatories by providing the facts we need to know before we choose the school, such as how many apply/audition and how many are chosen each year. It lists the department activities, degree concentrations, number of full time faculty, prices, enrollment, scholarships, entry requirements, and prominent alumni.

While certain colleges have been chosen to have in-depth profiles as described above, most creative schools have been listed by state under their specialty(acting, artist, dancing, music, writing) without in- depth profile for you to further investigate on your own. The biggest down fall of the book is that not enough colleges have been chosen for in-depth profiles on their creative departments.

This book also provides examples of creativer resumes and audition / portfolio requirements.

So the book is a starting ground for creative school investigation but must be used in conjunction with other information sources and books that outline creative schools. Use this in conjuction with Peterson's College Guide for Performing Arts Majors.

I only wish this book was around when I was researching colleges in NY! It's very comprehensive, simple to understand for any high school senior, and all of the information is up to date. Most other books hardly touch on the creative student- this book specializes in it. I recommended it to all the high schools in my area, and I'm pleased to say that they all love this book!

"Creative Colleges is very informative and it would have been so helpful to my daughter as a high school senior (she is now in college). It is much better to know about the things that are in this book well in advance. It is very helpful for parents and students starting the research. Also, there is very little information out there like this."

There are very few resources for students wanting to find good schools for the arts, so this book is a welcome addition in the college search department. The problem is that it is not as comprehensive as it could or should be.

The process of applying to creative programs, which have different requirements for admissions than most standard college programs, is well-explained with lots of examples. That part of the book, along with profiles of several schools was very helpful.

However, upon doing my own research of art schools on the internet, I found much more useful information than what I found in this book. I cannot comment on the music, dance, writing and acting schools in the book, but I can say that I was somewhat disappointed in the small number of art programs that were profiled in this book. The indexed listings in the book offered some additional schools by name and region, but little more than that which one can find in the standard college review books.

I'm not sure what the criteria were for the schools that received the more serious profiles (versus the ones that were merely mentioned in the listings), but if you're going to write a book like this, with the intention of helping students find the right creative college, why not go all the way? Still, it's nice to see that someone is finally trying to help creative students find the right educational fit.

Unfortunately, creative people and students are a forgotton demographic in the grand scheme of college guides. As far as my child and I are concerned, this is one of the best college guides out there, and certainly the essential book for high school students seeking entrance into a college fine arts program . It is full of detailed information regarding the colleges. The number of colleges profiled is just right; and for my child, presented in a such a way that it wasn't overwhelming. This book made the college search easier for my child and easier for me as a parent, by association.

Perhaps the biggest concern we had was picking the right program for her and going through the process. We relied on much of the research done by the author in the book to focus us on particular programs, rather than randomly searching the internet. In short, I would recommend this book for any aspiring creative student and their parents as a thorough research tool in their college search.

First - I should note that my son is a musician (instrumental)which makes my opinion not very helpful if you or your child is pursuing a different art form.

After specifically searching for this book, I decided to buy the recommended group of 3 titles ("Creative Colleges", the "Guide to College Choices for the Performing and Visual Arts" by Kavin Buck and the Peterson's "College Guide for Performing Arts Majors"). Buck's book was basically a useless outline while the Peterson's college guide was filled with useful and practical information. "Creative Colleges" fell somewhere in the middle. It's strength is in the emphasis on providing short reviews of relevant colleges with education in the particular art form. However, it left out some of the major conservatory programs - for instance -Juilliard, Curtis, Peabody. It also gave very basic information on how to approach the application process. I didn't realize how basic the information was until I read through the Peterson guide which had a much more detailed explanation of every step of the process. "Creative Colleges tries to present sidebar vignettes from real students, but they are so anecdotal it is hard to know what the takeaway message actually is. Once my son finishes high school, this is one book that I will quickly donate to the high school guidance counselors.

I am a parent of high school musicians who are interested in pursuing their dream in college. There are very few comprehensive resources available to music students and their parents. The book provides some foundational information about what to expect and gives one a lead or two on places to begin the search. Its quite a different process than deciding between engineering schools. I would recommend the book to all parents of artistic students.

This is a great book for those seeking advice, suggestions and useful information on any performing arts major. It ofers suggestions, tips and a lot of very useful information for this specific area of study.