Lot of good schools on the list of reaches. They are at varying levels with Violin performance within that group in terms of competition with admissions, but they are all in the competitive to highly competitive range.The problem with a big list is that you will have to audition live at a lot of them, and that isn’t easy.
The first things is teachers, which is the hard part. Has your son started looking into teachers at the programs, who might be a fit? Has he had exposure to any of them? Programs can be great and their violin faculty may not be at that level. Also teachers are not generically good, one teacher may be great with a certain kind of student and not another. If his current teacher has knowledge of at least some of the programs that is huge, because he knows your son and may know about the teachers. Music is not like calculus, it is more like an apprentice/master relationship and it has to work both ways. A school hypothetically can have teachers who are strong only with certain kinds of students (for example, taking a grad student/ad student and polishing them) and wouldn’t work with a typical incoming freshman. Teachers are one way to narrow down the list, if none of them seem a match, then that would eliminate the program (keep in mind, too, that if one teacher looks great there, you may not even get into his studio. Schools at auditions ask the student to list several choices in order, if the 1st one can’t take them, they try number 2 on the list). A couple of things that may help narrow down teachers (and programs):
-Talk to your teacher about the playing level your son is at (your son should talk to him/her) and about the expectations. A program like Juilliard probably gets hundreds and hundreds of kids applying and sending a prescreen, if not close to a thousand (I really don’t know how many applications they get a year, but it is a lot from all over the world, such is their reputation). I use Juilliard but this applies to other schools as well. Being realistic is important, I don’t want to discourage anyone, but if money and time constraints for going to auditions is limited, then it might not make sense to apply to a lot of reach schools. Obviously if you can afford to go to a lot of auditions and you are okay with working out conflicts in scheduling then it doesn’t hurt to apply.
-Try using the web to see who teachers have taught and what the students have done. This isn’t necessarily a be all and end all, because like I said, it could be the teacher is someone who is great at polishing already talented students, but not a younger student (you can kind of tell that, if you look at the bio of the student, you might see if they studied with them as UG or grad/ad level).
Also look at who the teacher studied with, that gives something of an idea of how they will teach.
-Beware of the star performer teacher, which is quite common. It doesn’t mean all star performers are not great teachers,there are a lot who are good teachers (and conversely, there are a lot of good teachers who are just that, who never had great performing careers, Delay comes to mind as one example), but look at what they have done teaching, how long as well ,as a prime thing.
-Obviously if you or the teacher know people who are violinists, in that world, they also know the reputations.
-As someone else said, where the school is located is part of this. Juilliard, MSM, NEC, Eastman, Peabody, Northwestern,BU,CMU urban, Oberlin is rural, Michigan is college town (though Anne Arbor is pretty big), Jacobs college town (again, not small). Not all the cities are the same of course and the school experience is different with stand alone music schools (MSM, Juilliard, NEC) vs in a university setting wherre there is a campus. My son went to NEC undergrad , which basically has Boston as a campus, Went to Rice grad and found he enjoyed being in a campus setting. Your son should think of that, where does he want to be?
-Jacobs is a big school, they are the largest of any of the music programs, and while being at U mich (with 100k students) you are in a big school, jacobs as a music school itself is large, they admit a lot of students, and that can be overwhelming for some students.
-Does your son have the idea of dual degree, ie a BM in music performance and a BA/BS in something else? That would possibly eliminate at least some of the stand alones.
-Take a look at the cost. Unfortunately music schools are not values in education $$$s and pretty much all the schools are going to be expensive to “omg”. Financial aid can be a big factor as well as merit aid. There are threads on CC about aid, you might be able to see what typical merit aid looks like. And be careful, that “well, I got 30k out of x” might seem like a lot, but when the total cost is approaching 80-90k at some schools, it may not matter.
In terms of NY state schools, I would add Stony Brook, they have some really good violin faculty last time I looked, I know some really good violinists who went there because it was affordable and liked the teaching (I don’t know purchase with Violin).
Okay, so how many should you apply to? Again, the key is going to be auditions, this isn’t like academic admits, where through the common app you can blitz schools. Most schools require live auditions and even 10 schools can be a lot of planning, because you end up with conflicts between schools, you can end up where you have an audition in California and the next day one in Boston (that one is from experience, my son auditioned at Colburn then had to fly on the red eye to Boston to have an audition at like 10am). And most will require pre screens and that is stressful too. I would say keep it to 10 and under (and keep in mind it is very possible that some of the pre screens will fail, so you might apply to 10 and get auditions at 8, depending). It can get really out of control with auditions (obviously, places that have regional or allow remote audition might be okay, but there still will be dates with doing that that could conflict with a live one).
I wish this was easier, with my son for whatever reasons he only applied to like 5 schools and got into most of them (then agonized over his decision, the fun never ends with the process:). Now that I have made this more difficult, take a deep breath and realize that when it comes to decisions, none of what I said is cut in stone or the absolute truth, in the end hopefully it helps with the decision process, that is the goal. It is very easy reading posts on here or what people to say that there is a golden path, things you have to do, and what I have found is that there are very few fatal errors, it isn’t like eating gas station sushi or Aunt Kate’s Chrismas cake, if your son is serious about music, it will happen, even if the final path is not what he thought originally, tell him to trust his instincts and go with it.