Playbill: As part of Playbill's Back to School week, take a look at our annual report on the colleges and universities with the most creative alums performing on Broadway in the 2025–26 Broadway season. Below you'll find this year's top 20 most represented schools for Broadway creatives (technically 22 due to ties). Take a look and see if your school—or a school you're considering attending—made the list!
11 comments:
I'm happy Shannon Musgrave shared this on the School of Drama's weekly newsletter. Now that I'm actually reading the article, I have a better understanding of where Carnegie Mellon stands on the ranking. The gap between first place NYU's Tisch School of the Arts compared to second place Yale's David Geffen School of Drama is jaw dropping. Additionally, the gap between second place and third place Harvard is just as great. I imagine half of the industry is full of these three school's alumni, and the other half makes up the rest of the schools featured on this list.
It is extremely impressive that Carnegie Mellon ranks fourth on this list and I am super honored and proud to be part of such a successful program. Of the second half of the people who are on Broadway, I imagine Carnegie Mellon makes up a fair portion of that group. I cannot complain to be in the same conversation as Columbia, Juilliard, and UNCSA.
I loved this article! I’m really glad it ended up on the blog website - I love seeing what CMU alumni are doing post-graduation, and it’s really comforting to know that a lot of them are finding success in their fields. I really liked getting to see exactly who the alumni were and what they were doing, including both their jobs and their shows. I also liked seeing a sound designer on the list, and especially one so successful; Peter Hylenski designed five shows just this season, and, aside from those, he’s been nominated for ten Tony awards for sound design! I really want to be a sound designer post-graduation, and it’s nice to know that CMU alumni are given the skills to be so successful and prolific, especially in my field. I also appreciated the chance to see all other other designers working on broadway currently, including the ones that didn’t go to CMU
I think it's really cool that Playbill does a roundup of all these creatives every year. It's awesome to see how many CMU alums are working on Broadway this year. It is definitely crazy the sheer number of alums on Broadway that NYU spits out, but it makes sense since they're so close in proximity to Broadway and likely have more opportunities to interact with the industry there. I thought it was cool that the CMU alums were so varied in their credits shown on Playbill. It was comforting to see that it isn't just one type of designer from CMU only getting work, but that there is a mix of designers, managers, writers, and directors. It speaks to CMU's well-rounded programming and their commitment to theater of all kinds. I don't have a strong need to design for Broadway, although it would be cool, but it is nice to see living proof that we can be set up for success here.
This list is really interesting to me, in its formatting as a straightforward list. Because of course NYU would have a higher proportion of people working on broadway, its location lends itself to primarily attract creatives interested in working on broadway, where as many other schools attract a more varied group of creatives, interested in working in multiple different facets of the industry. Yales place is much more interesting to me. As we all are aware, Yale only offers technical theatre education to its masters students, which makes me curious if the reason such a large number of Yale alumni make is successfully as creatives is because they have all already completed a bachlors degree and then made the decision to continue their education, perhaps implying a greater commitment to making it work successfully in this field than students at other schools who are only (“only”) getting a bachelor's degree.
Part of me really loves these types of articles that show where people went to school because I find it interesting that certain shows or certain fields pull mainly from one school or how some schools mainly have students who do one thing while CMU has a wide variety of concentrations who are now represented on Broadway. The last two years when I would go see a show with my mom we would look in the program bios of all the creative and production team members and see how many of them went to schools I was applying to. And I am very proud to now be part of a community that is in 4th for most alum creatives on broadway. However, I also find this article to disagree with what we are always lectured about when picking a school and I think it should be acknowledged in the article. In high school you get told by lots of people that choosing a school is about the fit for the individual students, not just how prestigious or where their alumni are being represented. But then we also get sent all of these articles about how many NYU alumni are working on Broadway this season and it shows that the school you go to is important for your success. I would like to see a full list of all the colleges represented and maybe a little more of a write up about these theatre programs rather than just a list.
I always find it interesting to look at colleges and where their students end up after they graduate. The teachers and students all make connections that then lead future generations to joining specific companies and pursuing particular careers. The top most universities tend to always make the list and year to year end up in slightly different places but I am always surprised to see random Ivy leagues on this list. Yale is definitely known for drama and we see them year after year at the top but colleges such as Dartmouth and Brown having tied and or beaten Michigan by the amount of people they have on Broadway currently astounds me. Although they are top notch universities in general I never knew either Dartmouth or Brown had a considerable drama program. Where you go to school is only one of the factors that can cause someone to go into a particular career even though some of them have a more obvious path than others.
I thought this article was really cool because it gives insight into where college students end up, specifically how many of them make it to Broadway. With the detailed information about each alum’s name, concentration, and contributions, the article seems pretty transparent and credible. This not only increases the credibility of the article, but also allows people who are interested to contact or follow up with these artists, which I find really helpful. It’s shocking, but also not that surprising, to see how many people from New York City end up working on Broadway. I also didn’t expect CMU to be tied with so many other schools. Before, I always felt really distant from Broadway, but this article helped make it feel more visible and showed me that Broadway dreams can actually be reachable. I can’t help but wonder whether the ranking will change when next year’s article is released.
Every time I see articles like this, of course it's nice to see where CMU lands in comparison to others, our program is so insanely robust and we have a magnitude of resources available to us at our disposal, a lot like other universities on this list, however I think it's important that one must keep in mind that the wording of lists like this have to be careful in fear of supporting this notion that there's only one way to make it in this business. (by attending one of these schools) I don't know whether the list is to be composed only of the same few names of conservatories or maybe there's greater variation than we think, which would be great for people studying elsewhere. In addition to the writers, there are other members of creative teams, directors, stage managers, designers, orchestrators, and etc., and I presume that the educational experience varies a lot more after moving on from the writers and directors whom people usually just remember!
Whenever I see one of these articles, I always click on it immediately. I love to see which names I can recognize from any school and what shows they've worked on. Specifically, I love to see where the CMU alumni are working and to see the accomplishments of our alumni, as I am a very proud student of the school. I think it's really exciting to always see our program high up on these lists of the creative team because some of these designers, managers, and artists are fantastic and deserve the recognition they're getting currently. I looked through this entire article, and it was just so interesting seeing these names I've heard mentioned in conversations and on programs and in conversation with other friends and to sort of put a name to a school and sort of recognize that the school will help you succeed, but your drive and your work ethic are the other half of the equation.
Articles like this always intrigue me because there are so man different way to get into the arts and be successful. While I am super proud of the college I go to, I had a hard time picking which one I was going to commit to at the end of senior year. I was really struggling with deciding which one would give me the best opportunities for what I wanted to do and what I wanted to learn. Seeing CMU so high on this list fills me with gratitude and relief that I made a good choice. On the other hand, there are several other schools on this list that I applied and got into. I think this gives me some sort of catharsis knowing that anywhere I would have chosen, I would have done great. There are also colleges on this list that do graduate programs, so my education could continue beyond just CMU to another one of these great programs.
I always find these rankings of schools so interesting, mainly because of location. Personally, I would expect that schools in locations closest to Broadway would find the most success on their stages, so NYU being in slot 1 and Yale at slot 2 makes total sense to me. I was admittedly surprised to see Harvard at 3 because I rarely hear about their program, and I was excited to see Carnegie Mellon tied for 4-7!! This list is so insightful because it shows me that theatre is everywhere. There are theatre makers from all over the world who attend these programs, and they give up so much to travel and spread their art. I feel honored to attend a school where I am constantly inspired by the people around me, and whose legacy I hope to one day contribute to. Every time I see a list like this one, I click on it to remind myself of what is possible at a school like CMU.
Post a Comment