Less Merit Aid for Music Kids?

musicprnt
Mon, 13 Mar 2017 16:06:19 +0000

I assume you are talking a performance degree of some sort here in a music school in a university, not a BA in academic music (ie theory, history, etc) or perhaps even a ba on an instrument. For a performace degree music merit will be based on how well the kid plays, grades and GPA will have little to nothing to do with it (in most standalone conservatories, for example, I doubt it weighs at all towards merit IMO). Kids applying to a music school within a university can get academic merit if their grades and test scores are decent, that depends on the school, I assume some do and some don’t.

Therefore trying to compare music merit to academic merit therefore is kind of meaningless, because they are judged differently. Music merit as I noted is based on how well the kid plays, and also how much the school/teacher wants them, a second tier school with a kid playing at the level of let’s say a 1st tier school will likely give more aid IME then the same kid at a first tier school because that kid to a second tier school would represent a step up whereas at a 1st tier might be the typical student. Plus financial aid in music schools often can be tied to need as well, At Juilliard all aid, merit or otherwise, is tied to need, they say that out front on their website, and that can factor in, too, to the merit awards.

That doesn’t mean grades and test scores don’t matter to a music school, some schools where the music school is inside a university will give both music merit and academic merit, and the latter is based on scores and grades, so it pays to keep grades and scores up, but not all schools do this.

The other thing to keep in mind is that music merit aid may be based in an entirely different pool of money, the school may have the music merit aid and the general merit aid in different funds. So it could be the academic merit aid pool has more money available than the music merit aid pool, so music students will get less, even assuming they did well on their audition, then a typical academic student would get if you can correlate academic achievement to music achievement (again, the scores and GPA mean little to nothing in the music merit awards).