Having gone through this dilemma with a very academic and very jazz oriented kid a few years ago, I can tell you that it’s hard to find a great solution. You’re not going to find a purely academic school that has the kind of robust jazz program that a kid who is serious about making a career in jazz needs. My son ended up at Columbia, which has one of the best jazz programs of any non-music school, and he loved it, but in addition to jazz at Columbia, he supplemented heavily with jazz resources in NYC outside the school. The Columbia jazz program really is terrific, but by itself it’s not enough for someone who wants to make jazz their career. And I don’t think there’s a pure academic college that would be better in this regard.
Harvard and Yale have only recently started to put some resources into jazz, but neither has anywhere near the jazz program that would be enough for a career-minded jazz musician (neither has the kind of jazz program that Columbia has), and Boston and New Haven do not have the resources for a jazz musician outside of school that New York has. Harvard does have a joint program with NEC (which has a terrific jazz program), but it’s almost impossible to get admitted to the joint program as a jazz musician. (Columbia has a joint program with Juilliard, but that’s also nearly impossible to get admitted to as a jazz musician.) Harvard recently started a joint program with Berklee, which is also a great place for a jazz musician - that was put in place after my son’s time, so I don’t have a good sense of how well it’s working. And if you point to people like Josh Redman or Aaron Goldberg, they made Harvard work as jazz musicians by doing all their jazz outside of Harvard.
There are some other good academic schools that are affiliated with good music school jazz programs, such as Oberlin, Michigan, Northwestern, USC and UCLA. Other colleges affiliated with good music school jazz programs include Indiana, SUNY Purchase, Rochester (Eastman), Hartford (Hartt) and Ithaca. I’m sure there are others too. But I don’t know how easy it is to straddle between the academic side and the music side at these schools, or whether the kids trying to straddle really get enough on the music side to be competitive in terms of making a career on the music side.
My son is now doing music full time, and amazingly is managing to support himself with the music, but most of the musicians he plays with come out of top pure jazz programs, such as MSM, Juilliard and New School, and not academic programs. Pursuing music as a career is hard, and pursuing it while trying to juggle an academic program is even harder. My son has no regrets about ending up at Columbia - he loved having the academic side as part of his college experience and loved being surrounded by incredibly bright classmates with a huge range of interests - but it definitely forced him to work harder to get the music experience he needed to make a career in jazz viable.