Stop Telling Kids a Theatre Degree Is Useless

(Photo: Playbill/Melody_Nicole)

by Jessa Blackthorne, Guest Editorial

"You'll never succeed in life with a theater degree."

It's a line so commonplace it has become a media trope: the unsupportive parent melting down at the thought of their kid "wasting their potential" by pursuing the Arts instead of something more "practical." 

You'll never get a job. You'll be broke. No one wants to hire someone with an arts degree.

I have a BFA in Musical Theatre, and I currently work full-time in the supply chain industry. I want to offer a different perspective. (And as an aside, for those of you weighing the practicality question, my mom gave me some advice when I was graduating high school that has genuinely served me well: get your bachelor's degree in something you love, and if you need something more practical later, that's what a master's degree is for. Most companies don't care what your bachelor's degree is in as long as you have one. Whatever field of study will get you to complete your education is the one you should pursue.)

The assumption behind the "useless degree" argument is that a theatre degree works like a nursing or education degree, so narrowly focused on one specific career path that it becomes nearly impossible to leverage elsewhere. From the outside, that's not an unreasonable assumption to make. The difference is that those degrees teach you a very specific set of skills in order to do a very specific job. A theatre degree teaches you something harder to quantify: how to learn.

Think for a minute about what an actor actually has to do. Today you might be playing a nurse, but tomorrow it could be a CEO, and next month a 17th-century courtesan. (Do you know about the social relevance of Chocolate Houses in 17th-century England? I do. And that’s because of theatre.) If you want to portray any of those characters believably and honestly, you have to be able to research quickly, absorb information accurately, and then deploy it convincingly under pressure. You also have to be able to do all of that in a completely different context the next time around. That kind of dynamic adaptability is one of the most sought-after qualities in any workplace, but it's something most degree programs never actually teach you. 

But theatre does, because it has to.

And that's before we even get to everything else a theatre program puts in front of you: public speaking, team management, historical research, text analysis, carpentry, lighting, sound design, color theory. These are skills that, in any other context, would each constitute their own specialized program. Theatre hands you all of them and then teaches you how to go get more.

If you want to look at one aspect of theatre education that is the most valuable, look at the humble audition. It is essentially a masterclass in professional skills, and it’s a core fundamental that most theatre programs spend hours teaching their students. 

When you walk into the room, you have minutes to make a first impression on people who hold your future in their hands. You represent yourself with poise, perform under pressure, and make the case that you are the answer to their problem. That is, word for word, a sales pitch. You can sell anything if you can sell yourself in an audition, and communicating that by saying "I beat out a significant number of other candidates for a competitive role" will reflect considerably better on you in a job interview than trying to explain what it means to play a character.

Three of my first temp jobs out of college were in IT, biopharmaceuticals, and marketing. I knew nothing about any of those fields going in (genuinely nothing about biopharmaceuticals), but if I made it to the interview, I got the job. Because I knew how to walk in, explain exactly how my education applied to what they needed, and make clear that even if I didn't have the specific knowledge yet, I absolutely knew how to get it fast. That is a skill theatre school gave me, and I have used it more than almost anything else I learned.

The trick is knowing how to communicate what you actually learned and leveraging it. A theatre degree only looks useless if you walk out of it letting people think that it only taught you how to do a jazz square. It didn't. It taught you how to be a fast, versatile, well-rounded learner who can research anything, speak to anyone, work in a team, and perform under pressure in high-stakes situations.

I don't regret my BFA for a single second. And if someone is trying to talk you out of yours, consider this: Dan Schulman, the former CEO of Paypal, has a theatre degree, and he’s not alone. Because a theatre degree doesn’t train you for one job: it trains you for a world of them.