As part of Playbill.com's Back to School week (#BwayBacktoSchool), we show you how to find your dream school on PlaybillEDU.com.

Guidance counselors and teachers may be helpful for students who want to be actors or to play the piano, but what about the ones who want to study a specialty like set design? Or a lesser-known instrument like the viola? Or a discipline like modern dance?

Many schools have a Nov. 1 deadline for Early Decision or Early Action applications. Regular applications may not be due until Jan. 1, Feb. 1 or later, but the time to start investigating and comparing schools is now. The free website PlaybillEDU can help make college planning easy.

What if you can’t afford a brand-name college, or if you don’t have the grades to get into the Ivy League? What if you want to study in a place where you can enjoy the sunshine, or if you prefer to ski, or if you live in a big city and yearn for the countryside (or vice versa) and you just don’t know where to begin looking for those things? You’re afraid you’re going to spend a lot of money and wind up in a college where you may be unhappy.

Now you can relax. Playbill, the company that supplies all the information about shows, dance troupes and symphony orchestras across North America through our programs and websites, has done all the research for you, and put it all in an easy-to-search, easy-to-compare FREE search engine, PlaybillEDU.com, that will help you to find your dream school. Follow these steps to figure out which colleges to apply to.

* Log In: Go to PlaybillEDU.com and click the “Signup” button in the upper right. Sign up (free) as a student, a parent/guardian or a teacher/counselor. All signup information is confidential.

* Begin Your Guided Search: One of the most popular tools on the website is the Guided Search that helps high school and transfer students find the right college in the right location at the right price. Click the “Search” button at the top of the page, then choose “Guided Search.” PlaybillEDU will ask you several simple questions about your preferences (you can answer as few or as many as you like to broaden or narrow your results), then will search among our 2,000 theatre, music and dance programs to find the program that best suits your needs. We have upgraded the Guided Search function to make it easier and more accurate.

* Fields of Study: To help you sort through the dozens of available fields of study, we’ve designated 17 top-level general fields. Once you’ve chosen one of them (examples: musical theatre, acting, vocal musical performance, performing arts education), the Guided Search tool uses that as an overall criteria to help you find your perfect school.

* Impartial Results: Playbill does not accept money from colleges to improve their standings. You will get completely impartial results based exclusively on your own interests.

* Compare Schools: PlaybillEDU allows you to compare schools side-by-side to determine which one comes closest to your dream school. This is perhaps the most valuable feature of the service.

* Save Your Search: With your PlaybillEDU account you can save your searches and your comparisons in order to come back to them later. You can also offer to share a look at your account with a parent, guardian, teacher or counselor who signs up for the service.

* Counselors/Teachers: In addition to students and parents, counselors and teachers now can create their own PlaybillEDU accounts to search schools on their own, with their own customized toolbar to keep track of how chosen students are progressing.

* Customer Support: PlaybillEDU staff is available to respond to your support needs via our online support ticketing system. We endeavor to answer all tickets within one business day of their receipt (we always hope to be even faster than that!).

* Optimized for Tablet: We have optimized the PlaybillEDU experience to make sure that our Tablet users enjoy the best possible browsing.

Visit PlaybillEDU.com and start researching your future today.

Learn everything you need to know about getting ready for the new school year with Playbill.com's special Back to School Week! Read more stories here and follow us on social media at #BwayBacktoSchool.