- The accreditation was recently renewed on February 16, 2018.
- The next accreditation review was scheduled for February 13, 2026.
Academic/career counseling services
Employment services for current students
Even if you don't need financial aid, the ability of past students to successfully repay loans speaks to the value of the education received.
The default rate is the percentage of students who are already delinquent on their loans within three years of leaving the school. If a school has a high default rate, that sends an alarm out that the students' educations are not sufficient to earn enough to repay those loans. Read below for details on the typical loan burden, and keep in mind that a low default rate may be more important than loan amounts in predicting your future success.
At American Conservatory Theater, 100% of full-time degree-seeking freshmen receive federal student loans, averaging $7,500 each in just the freshman year. We have much more details about the full loan burden students experience in our Cost and Financial Aid Section.
Schools are required to report the ratio of students per instructor, but look for a small number of students for every full-time instructor as your best indicator of personal attention and a modern well-integrated curriculum.
Here's an opportunity to explore the faculty's diversity. For many schools, attracting a diverse teaching faculty can be a challenge. It's important to judge their success with the reality check of what their peer schools have accomplished.
Who might be attending school with you? We'll look at what degrees most students have received, whether they are on campus or online, a little about their path, and the overall student body size. Our aim is to give some idea of what the campus culture might be.
This donut chart shows you what degrees were awarded by American Conservatory Theater last year, and gives you a good idea of this school's focus. Make sure this school's focus matches your goals.
There are performance problems with many online-focused schools -- you can read about this in an Ididio case study, but you may want some online options to give you greater flexibility.
You will be most happy at a school with a large number of students who are like you, whether that's someone who enters right out of high school, or someone who is transferring, or someone who isn't ready to work towards a degree.
Another breakdown that can help is a view of the student body size. Here we show undergraduate and graduate student counts, including part-time versus full-time students. If the proportion of students that best describes you is relatively small, then is it possible that another school might be better-prepared to meet your needs?
The NPR article A Campus More Colorful Than Reality: Beware That College Brochure emphasizes the importance of judging a school's diversity based on solid data as promotional materials are eager to suggest a multicultural student body.
Student race is only categorized for non-international students, and international students are listed separately.
The age distribution at a school can tell you a lot about its mission. If you're looking for a traditional undergraduate experience, you may prefer to see students who are mostly younger than 25 (lighter shades), but if you want support as a returning student, a large number of students 25 and older (darker shades) may better suit your needs.
There are multiple outside factors that can affect the gender balance of students recruited by schools. As an example, within less-affluent families higher education is more frequently attained by women than by men, a phenomenon explored in the Atlantic. Therefore, schools serving lower-income populations may be more likely to see a gender imbalance. On the other hand, some colleges may offer predominantly degrees that are stereotypically associated with a single gender, affecting the ratio of men to women accordingly.
Here are some important dates and little tidbits. Please double-check this information on the American Conservatory Theater's webpage for the most up-to-date and accurate answers! We update this information with each school's annual reporting, but information can change unexpectedly. Select any item to view the details.
Acceptance is a two-way street, because while you may be concerned about whether or not your favorite school will accept you, the colleges and universities are equally worried about whether you will attend if accepted.
See how this school's published costs have changed over the year, and how their cost trends compare with other private schools.
It's important to remember that a school's published costs may not be indicative of what it will actually cost to attend. Time magazine wrote about this in their article Yes, you can get a college to cut its tuition price. Nonetheless, this inflation-adjusted look at the historic annual costs for tuition, fees, books, and supplies can give you an idea of the costs you might expect in the coming years. Comparing the total costs inclusive of room and board (if applicable) with the annual net price estimates in the previous tab will help you determine the financial aid package to expect.
Private and public universities' charges are difficult to compare due to the in-state and out-of-state price differences of public universities, and therefore we only compare American Conservatory Theater to other private schools within your chosen context group.
Here's a quick summary of costs to attend American Conservatory Theater. You will find the most up-to-date information at their website for admissions.
Understanding the rules and process that determine who gets financial aid can be intimidating. Here are some quick links to help:
Visit American Conservatory Theater's Net Price Calculator for the most accurate estimate of your anticipated costs. Every school publishes a Net Price Calculator that does its best to give you a fair estimate of what you might expect to pay. Many calculators consider your high school record as part of the calculation. This will be far more accurate than any of the averages or published tuition values that you see here.
FederalStudentAid, a government site that will walk you through the federal financial aid process. There are a number of kinds of student loans and other aid, and this site can walk you through all of the choices you will need to make.
This school does not report any housing for students.
Where a school spends and collects its money can suggest a lot about the educational experience it offers. The tabs below offer a look at spending that is important for the quality of your experience if you attend.
Instructional expenses are primarily the salary and benefits paid to the heart of a school: its full-time instructors. High expenditures in this area suggest care in hiring enough highly qualified full-time faculty to provide personal attention and up-to-date subject-area excellence.
You can find a myriad of articles about the enrollment crises expected across US colleges and universities due to fewer births during the 2008 recession and other demographic shifts. The end result to you is that you need to protect your college investment by researching the financial stability of schools that you are considering. Many of our metrics are based on the excellent advice of Forbes' Financial Health Grades.
Ididio does not want to see you stuck with debt and no degree.
The core operating margin is the percentage by which core revenues exceed (or, when negative, fall short of) core expenses, so higher is better here. This margin excludes finances for non-academic expenses such as housing, hospitals, or other independent operations. For schools with large endowments, this measure can be volitile from year-to-year without indicating concern because investment losses and gains are driving this figure, but if an institution's margin is trending downwards or consistently negative, you should be concerned.
American Conservatory Theater is a private not-for-profit school. Along with publicly-controlled schools, not-for-profit schools do not have the goal of annual profit, but they do want to have healthy finances with adequate revenue to meet all expenses. On the other hand, private for-profit schools have creating a profit for shareholders as an annual goal.
We divided revenue and expenses for American Conservatory Theater into categories to give some insight to what may have influenced peaks and ditches in the chart above. The purple shades correspond most directly to student education. The blue shades, auxiliary expenses and revenue, are often related to room and board. We show investment gains and losses in apricot.
Related to the previous question of whether the annual revenue stream is stable is the question, "How deep are this school's pockets?" For many schools, a major source of annual income is investment growth. Schools with large endowments have a built-in revenue stream, although you'll see in the accompanying graphs that this revenue stream is highly dependent on the nation's economy. You can choose how to examine the depth of American Conservatory Theater's resources by selecting from the buttons below.
Here we examine assets at American Conservatory Theater in context, and it seems most fair to adjust for the size of the institution. We examine the assets per full-time-equivalent student so that we level the playing field for size.
There's a catch to these assets, though. Many gifts to a school's endowment have strings attached; the money is restricted to a specific purpose. Assets shown in green below are unrestricted, and are very important to a school's ability to meet its financial obligations. Some assets are the land and buildings that a school must have in order to function, and these may appear as green (unrestricted assets) but are nonetheless less helpful in meeting annual financial commitments. This look at assets is only a piece of the puzzle as we decide if a school is stable.
A rigorous academic program requires that students and faculty alike are engaging in independent research, and that activity requires strong library support. You can get some useful information here:
- How strong and how balanced between traditional physical books and easily-accessed (but expensive) electronic journals and other resources is this library?
- How much is this library borrowing from other libraries? The number of interlibrary loans received can indicate the school's commitment to getting the resources on-campus researchers need, and also of the research activity on campus.
- How big a resource is this library to other libraries? A large number of outgoing interlibrary loans speaks highly of the value of its content.
The presence of a library in and of itself is a good thing. Increasingly, libraries are comfortable and inviting spaces for individual and group study sessions. Librarians can be incredibly friendly guides in your quest to find materials that aid your learning.
Any school that reports at least $150,000 in research and development expenditures in a given year should have submitted out the Higher Education Research and Development (HERD) survey to the National Science Foundation (NSF). We did not find HERD data for American Conservatory Theater, so there would at most modest graduate-level academic scholarship campus-wide.
