I haven’t seen much discussion of the transfer path here, and it’s a great point. Outside of CC, I have seen lots of discussion about going to a “lesser” school and transferring into a preferred program.
Berklee actually suggests some specific schools on their website. This information is in relation to COST of Berklee, but I think the list is interesting in that there are other schools that can specifically prepare a student for the Berklee curriculum.
We have 23 international partner schools and six in the U.S. and Canada empowered to teach the first two years of Berklee College of Music curriculum. Many of these programs were started by Berklee alumni and/or employ many of our alumni as teachers. Every one of them is significantly less expensive than Berklee, both because they are often in lower cost-of-living locations and because their tuition is less. In the U.S., our partners comprise three community colleges (Miami-Dade in Florida; Cuyahoga in Cleveland, Ohio; and Fullerton in California) that are publicly subsidized. While almost every student would rather spend four full years in Boston, not every student can afford to do so, and this option works very well for hundreds of students each year. As an example, our partner school in São Paolo, Brazil, Souza Lima, has an annual tuition of approximately $11,100 per year—dramatically less than Berklee in Boston. And the cost of living in São Paolo is lower than the cost of living in Boston.