<p>From what I have heard, Columbia pays private teachers $60 per hour for lessons, which are cost-free to the student. There are some excellent teachers, but that is not much money in NY. Juilliard teachers charge around $200 per hour, which is one of the reasons that the Columbia-Juilliard exchange takes so few students, even amongst the small pool of students good enough at both academics and music to get into Juilliard and Columbia independently of each other. Even if a student does get admitted into both schools and also into the joint program, Juilliard offers only lessons, no ensembles to them and they must reaudition after sophomore year, competing with Juilliard students, for admission into the masters program. At the Juilliard admissions presentation we attended, the rigors of the program were evident: students are expected to practice around 6 hours a day. Columbia students take 5 classes or so a semester, each of which is very demanding, including extensive reading for the core curriculum in a wide range of fields. It is hard to schedule classes at both schools because of the days on which most classes are taught, which don’t jive between the two schools. The music performance program at Columbia is okay but not great – the orchestra is so-so, rehearses only once a week, has relatively few performances. The chamber program is disorganized, though groups can audition to play in concerts at Weill Hall, which is pretty exciting. It is pretty much a question of putting together your own group and finding a coach. There is very little performance space around Columbia. My son preferred the performance opportunities at UC Berkeley, which has a more active performance scene, great performance spaces, very energetic and engaged orchestra (David Milnes) and choral (Marika Kuszma) conductors and a noon concert series that students regularly participate in. They only subsidize lessons a token amount, like $20 a week or so, but there are excellent teachers in the Bay Area and they charge about half of what Juilliard teachers command.</p>