She chose Peabody for the following reasons in order of importance:
TEACHER…she had a lesson with the professor and she loved it! She had a trial lesson with every school she auditioned at, and the professor at Peabody worked the best with my daughter. Also, she is very reputable in the viola world.
Financially- Go where the money is at! How can you beat 16K out of pocket a year for a top notch conservatory? She felt valued and sought-aftered.
Programming- My daughter wants to focus on collaboration not solo. They have new chamber programing there and the professor there told her it is fabulous.
Option to take a minor at JHU. This was a big deal for her.
She had a conversation with a peer from her highschool studio who is currently at Peabody studying with the same professor my daughter will study with, who affirmed that the professor is amazing, the school has high caliber students and the opportunities at JHU are outstanding. It seems like she made her first friend.
I can’t say her choice was based on prestige, because all schools she chose were prestigious. But Peabody has a great reputation and seems very stable financially. She also likes the location being close to DC and also a drive into NY if she chooses.
PS This was not her dream school initially, but she is none-the-less excited after looking at all the positive aspects. This is just an example as to why one should keep open the possibility of investigating other schools and not be so tunnel visioned.
Congrats! Peabody is a great place and seems to be giving out really generous awards this year. I wish the places we applied were as generous…I think our lowest came out to a bit under $30K a year. Now we have to do the appeals process and hope that each will come down as the other does.
Peabody has this idea of attracting the best talent. Not all talented are rich and they are heavily funded with endowments. Good luck with the appeal process.
Congrats! That is amazing merit award for a high caliber school! A friend of my son’s is completing their MM on Viola, and they recently got accepted into the Philadelphia orchestra! and yes, they have a strong chamber program there.
Peabody kind of has the Avis mentality (which is not a bad thing at all), where they kind of say “We’re number 2 but we try harder”:). Sadly there are some top tier music schools who have the attitude “All our students are great, and you should feel blessed to go here, no matter the cost”. It is a good school that has had its ups and downs, like all schools, but in the end it is one of the better music schools in the country that in comparison to other schools has unfairly been classified as ‘not as good’ IMO.
I am sure there is some truth to this, which is why it was not my daughter’s dream school. But like you eluded to previously, the viola program is strong there. The professor there in viola is extremely well known and excellent, apparently expecting a ton of hard work which my daughter likes. So again, school aside, I feel the professor is what matters most.
haha … that’s Juilliard! (we’re waiting on merit aid). They really don’t seem to care about getting the best talent as they end up with a lot of waitlist candidates each year for our instrument because they don’t give enough incentive for the actual top players to attend (this might be a unique problem to our instrument though).. .frustrating because, for many reasons, their location and set up is ideal for us and our kid but I doubt the financials will work out.
Congrats to you and your musician! Thank you for outlining the journey, it’s so helpful to others. It sounds like peabody is the perfect place for her and you can’t beat that COA!
Question to current round of parents - do any of your kids have experience with taking auditions in the UK (RCM, RAM, Guildhall & RNCM)? I’m asking now because my son (currently hs junior) is seriously considering applying to the gauntlet of UK conservatories in addition to the usual suspects here in the US where we live. We are leaning towards him doing the live in London rounds which occur late Nov/ early Dec but he has to submit applications by Oct 1 (hence why I am reaching out to veterans now). Do the various schools schedule same instrument days fairly close or is it spread out over 2-3 weeks (trying to see if he would miss too much school). If fortunate enough to receive an offer from a school it appears that would be late December; how long do they have to accept (or how much is deposit if we were willing to risk it) considering US conservatories don’t announce results until end of March? We appreciate any guidance you all can offer!
Like others have said all along, if you can pay premium for prestige, then you are very fortunate and why not? We are also super fortunate to have one of the best viola professors in the country reaching out my D reiterating how excited she is to hopefully work with her AND demonstrate that desire by blessing us with a large metit! That is a win-win imho. Even if Peabody is not as reputable as Julliard. My D may have been accepted there, but we didn’t waste our time knowing we would never have been able to afford it. Julliard can get away with mediocre merit, because of it’s name. But that doesn’t mean the talented aren’t at other schools. Congratulations to your daughter. Hope she is thriving!
Hi DD did RCM and USA and was at RAMjd; auditions generally run over mid Nov mid Dec and are finished by Xmas for UK applicants. Some have two rounds and internationals may be in the later post Xmas group . If you want to do then all in person then I am guessing you may need to be around for a month. The actual dates for some come out quite late so you may need to be flexible.. they do group days by instrument within the conservatoire so not much flex ifcan’t make it as some do call backs the same day. DD auditioned for RCM by submitted video as she was unwell - she did get in
Juilliard is a top notch music program that is ideally located, has great faculty and a lot going for it. That said, as a school,given the cost of the school and now fraught music is as a career/vocation, their attitude is basically as I said, that you should be grateful to go here and if the aid isn’t good enough don’t complain, take out loans if you have to (and while it is paraphrased, that is what the dean of admissions at a parents information day said outright). Juilliard has a big endowment, but they don’t strive to make the school more affordable for talented kids who don’t come from money. One of the reasons is Juilliard gets a lot of kids from well off backgrounds who pay full freight , especially from overseas students who also are very talented/well trained, so it doesn’t hurt them in terms of the student pool not to offer better aid. I can tell you that at one point Juilliard’s endowment had grown so big they were getting attention from the IRS, because non profits legally are supposed to use a certain percent of their endowment each year and they weren’t meeting that.
We were fortunate as a family, wherever my son went we could afford to pay full freight (and yes, my son got into Juilliard, as well as a number of other top level programs), I am critical of Juilliard because on the one hand they tell you that a large percent of kids get aid , but a lot of that is nominal, and then they talk about how they strive to make sure people from all backgrounds can go to the school, but financially they don’t back that up.
Don 't get me wrong, Juilliard is a great school, there is a lot to say for it, but I also think that there is an arrogance there that works against them in terms of what they claim their mission is. Juilliard in music is the equivalent of the Ivy league in terms of being selective, but the Ivy league does a much better job of making the school affordable, they make an effort, Juilliard is quite parsimonious in comparison and that is my beef with them.
Yes, they are. Juilliard basically can pick and choose among the best of the best, the level is generally that high (like any school, there are kids who get in there who get in through connections, because their teacher gave them a strong boost if they are 'distinguished faculty) and it is global, the name is that strong (In Asia the name has incredible widespread cache. One of my son’s friends visited relatives in the hinterlands of Korea, real rural area, and the first thing they asked them is if they went to Juilliard…and were disappointed they hadn’t gone there, they only had gone to Curtis lol).
My son still follows the high end music competitions on violin, and when it comes to them lot of the winners didn’t go to Juilliard . If you look in the chamber music world, while there are people who went to Juiliard in groups, and even groups forming out of there, there are a ton of people who didn’t go to Juilliard. When I said Peobody had the Avis mentality, I meant simply that they were hungry to improve the program and get talent, not just talent that could afford to go there without needing aid and they are asking themselves what do we need to do that; Juilliard on the other hand doesn’t have to because their name is so strong. Yes, Juilliard has prestige, its name and brand are literally global (want to know where at least some of their money went? They opened a Juilliard in China) but that doesn’t mean that it is the only place where talent thrives. To a certain extent NEC has the perception of falling into Juilliard’s shadow, yet in some departments and their orchestra IMO are better faculty than Juilliard has. That prestige means Juilliard is to a lot of kids the must go to place, but that prestige doesn’t make the student a great musician, they and their teachers and their desire does. After you graduate the name won’t get you into an orchestra, it won’t get you in a chamber group, it won’t get you hired by an Opera company, that is governed by how well you play /sing and what kind of person you are, too. Being at a school like Juilliard can drive a student to do better, because they see how good others are, it is where being the big fish in a small pond can work against a student;but if the student is self driven, knows what exemplary playing sounds like, and has a good teacher, that isn’t a handicap necessarily.
It is why I don’t like ranking music schools or making a big deal of ‘X is better than Y’, because in some regards it is as bogus as the US News and World report college rankings.
My problem here is that from our experience, which is current and not based on what the old dean said a decade or more ago, is that many students, my D included, get merit based aid in line with other Tier1/2 conservatories and what you are saying is false. My impression is that merit aid that brings the tuition down to higher end In-State tuition rates plus a $5-10k premium is relatively common. That is what we tended to be offered if we got aid offers at all and that is what we got from Juilliard. Now that is not cheap and NYC is expensive, but for us we did not have any full tuition offers anywhere we applied and we were willing to pay the cost. That’s a personal decision that each family has to make individually. The premium I was referring to was more about housing than tuition. I just don’t understand why Juilliard is synonomous with overpriced, when in our experience it is not different than most conservatories, i.e Bienen, Shepherd, Eastman, etc. If we had gotten full rides (which we gladly would have taken one) and Juiliiard wanted us to pay 25k tuition then I’d echo your sentiment, but that wasn’t the case and we know many students where that is not the case. I’m not even mentioning that a handful of undergrads get 100% COA Kovner scholarships each year.
I don’t really want to be a Juilliard apologist, but I just want to set the record straight based on what I have observed over the last couple cycles. Also, this may differ for different instruments but I believe it to be generally true overall. If you want to call out Juilliard for something, how about the fact that there is not enough practice rooms to go around and the food stinks.
The reason I singled out Juilliard was because quite frankly their endowment is by far way bigger than any of the other big conservatories/music schools and thus they have the ability to be more generous with aid IMO. And yes, Juilliard is in NYC which means it is very expensive in terms of living expenses as well and that factors into the equation there too. And again, Juilliard has an endowment that dwarfs the other big music schools, they could be doing better IMO. It is just that.
I need to apologize to you, when I made my comments about Peabody it was not a shot at them at all. What I was trying to say is that Peabody seems to be going out of their way to make themselves an attractive destination for top students, by in this case giving generous aid. Peabody is a top music program and your D getting in there and getting that merit aid means something. If in any way, shape or form it sounded like I was knocking it, I wasn’t, and I apologize if it could be taken that way. FWIW I think your D is going to have a great experience at a great music school.
