Great questions. Peabody’s admissions process and scholarship pool is completely separate from the rest of Johns Hopkins. The bad news about that is that you don’t get the benefit of JHU’s full-meets-need policy (we took out a Federal Parent Plus loan to meet the difference). The good news is that the academic requirements are, in general, less stringent for Peabody than they are of any other JHU school (i.e. Krieger, Bloomberg, Whiting, etc), particularly for performance majors. The Peabody jazz students who got better scholarships were the ones who had better resumes (i.e. YoungArts finalists, NYO Jazz members) and whom Sean Jones, the director, had more direct contact prior to applications and auditions.
With regards to Bard and The New School, my recollection, though not 100% confident, is that they were merit-based. I particularly remember having a conversation with another parent about New School since that offer came in after Bard and we were somewhat disappointed that it didn’t match; she told me that the number was slightly above average for New School jazz majors in general and much larger than any other jazz percussion major she had heard of; threads on this board at the time seemed to bear that out. (I should add that New School was his best audition and they had the absolute best reaction to him; the evaluators/judges initially thought he was applying to grad school based on his playing that day).
We actually used both of those offers to get a slight – VERY slight – bump in the Peabody scholarship offer. It was enough to push us over the top since my son liked the structure of the program at Peabody better (New School was more rigid), he really connected well with the whole faculty there, and he really wanted to take classes on the main Johns Hopkins campus (Homewood) and potentially get a minor there.
Note that he had developed a close connection with Alison Miller (New School drum faculty) from his summers at Stanford Jazz Camp and he would’ve loved to study with her, so it made the decision difficult; however, she told him that they probably wouldn’t have let him into her studio until he was a junior, whereas he could pick any of the awesome percussion faculty at Peabody (Warren Wolfe, Nasar Abady, and at the time Quincy Phillips) as a freshman and move back-and-forth across studios year to year if he wished. He ended up studying with all three: Quincy for the first 3 semesters, then moving to Warren’s studio for the remainder of the time, and even having one semester with Nasar (while Warren took a little time off of teaching to tour and perform) and being assigned to Nasar’s combo as a freshman.
Hope this helps. Please let me know if you have any follow up questions.