Trying to keep options open for music major

College Majors Music Majors
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I love the way you are thinking this process through. My input is to rely on your son’s private teacher to rate the audition school list. I copied my son and his teacher’s process from another thread below. Note that my son was looking at stand alone conservatories and university based programs, but he was not prioritizing non-music academics.

When my son applied, he and his teacher came up with a handful of schools where my son wanted to pursue/attend based on his criteria of teacher, opportunities in school and in the area and opportunity for merit money. He chose 2 “safeties” 2 “matches” and 2 “reaches”. The method for categorizing what was a safety/match was not specifically based on the acceptance rate of the program. It was based on other factors including:

  1. His teacher having a good idea of where my son’s level would rank at a particular program. This was based on his teacher placing a number of students each year.
  2. Any relationship with a professor at a prospective school. This was based on sample lessons/master classes.
  3. Knowing students and their level of playing who applied and were accepted in the year or two prior.

This process worked out well for my son. He landed at an amazing program with great merit!

Edited to add: I agree there is not really a music safety with an audition based program. However a very experienced teacher can help a lot with determining possibility of acceptance. We are forever grateful to my son’s teacher for his support and wisdom.

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Johns Hopkins does have dual degree programs for students to enroll in both Homewood and Peabody; however, the physical distance between the two campus is an obstacle too big to neglect. When my son auditioned there last year, several students confirmed that dual degree students worked very very hard to keep up.
Rice does not have dual degree program. It is possible for Shepherd students to take classes in other field to earn a second major; however, very few have succeeded. Shepherd is very demanding.
U Michigan has dual degree program and many students are making decent progress pursuing theirs. A former student of mine and several of my son’s friends are among them. It’s a lot of work but well within the range of their capability.
Northwestern is also known for dual degree programs. Bienen is very supportive of their students taking on another major or another degree.

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A music supplement (video, resume, letters of rec) can help a lot with admissions at non-music schools. But it seems he is headed for a BM one way or the other!

As you know, Bard requires a double degree for conservatory students. I also know someone who did Bard College but used the resources of the Conservatory and went on to grad work in music, so “low wall” there as well as Oberlin.

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I hate to suggest playing the system but if he has any interest in LACs or Ivys (not his teacher) he should consider sending a supplement for horn. This is much more likely than piano to help his application esp since his horn level is so high.

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That does make sense, how would you all be able to guess at his audition chances?! And as someone pointed out earlier, it changes every year based on the applicant pool. Another thing I have noticed - at Oberlin they mentioned that many students with dual degrees take five years, and they don’t require a student to leave the studio after four years, so the turnover rate is even smaller at those schools. If there are 18 spots in a studio, and students take 5 years to finish rather than 4 (or 3 at conservatories), that reduces even further.

@anotheroboemom His teachers knows the faculty of many schools well but I don’t think she places many students (she has always had only a handful of students, not a full studio), so I’m not sure she will be that helpful in terms of his chances. I’ll have to puzzle over another way to think about that. I’m glad your child’s teacher was so helpful, that would make it a lot easier.

@somethings Just as you say, I have been more and more thinking about the physical distance as something to be very mindful of. And - this is harder info to get - integration in other ways. Are their courses scheduled on the same timetable, same days? (i.e. Does one school have courses MWF 9-9:50 or T/TH 9-11:30 sort of timetable while the other school has a completely different timetable?) Thanks for the info on the other schools, it is important to note which students are successful at which dual degree programs i.e. Rice and Northwestern are not apples to apples.

@helpingthekid73 That’s a very good point. I will make sure he does a horn supplement. He is not in any way representing that he will be a super active horn player, but my experience at my daughter’s Ivy is that they are always scrounging around for good players of more obscure instruments even if they barely show up to rehearsal. I remember sitting through one of her performances, a symphony I hadn’t heard before, and I leaned over to my husband and whispered “is this supposed to sound sad?” No, it wasn’t, but the brass section was playing a variety of diminished and augmented 2nds (did I manage a music joke . . . ?) So I don’t think that’s gaming the system, they might be perfectly happy to have a good horn player on campus and let the other kids strong arm him into joining :slight_smile:

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I don’t want to create a tangent, but what is a Kickstarter list?!

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College Kickstart (Kickstarter?) is a program that his high school uses to assign likely, target, reach and unlikely to his list based on his GPA, test scores, and historical data from kids at his school. So you enter the GPA and test scores, enter a college, and it tells you where that college falls for you. It’s quite accurate and every year they share data on the number of kids who applied to unlikelies and were offered spots (typically 1-2% of applications and the kids are all closely hooked i.e. big donors or nationally ranked athletes), the reaches really are RD circa 25%, 50% for RD target and around 90% for RD likely. The school uses ED data to try to get families to make a realistic ED1 and ED2 plan and not waste the EDs on moonshot unlikelies showing that chances improve significantly for reaches that use ED. It was super helpful for helpingthekid73 to point out that info is not nearly as relevant for my son as for my previous two kids, where the Kickstart list was fine if it had 3 likelies, 3 targets, and however many reaches they had appetite to apply to. Even if he has a balanced list in Kickstart it may be really unbalanced for his purposes. That was a really helpful re-set for my thinking today.

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Also - a funny note on Kickstart - when my older daughters were applying the GPA was unlocked, i.e. they could fiddle with it. That was actually helpful for my second daughter because she could see- there is nothing she can do that will move X college from unlikely to reach, but improving her GPA a little will move X college from reach to target, and so on. It was good in grounding her in reality even though we know that those little things aren’t binary in a holistic application. But when my son’s Kickstart account opened this spring, I noticed the GPA was locked. I asked why, and the counselor said that too many students (parents?) were fiddling with it in a way that didn’t match reality (i.e. our school is entirely unweighted, so they would enter weighted GPAs even though that would invalidate the high school’s historical data). So they locked the GPA - only the counselor can change it - to keep families grounded in reality.

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It still could be very helpful to work with his private teacher to assess level related to particular studios. While you don’t want to place undue pressure on the teacher (and of course I don’t know your teacher or your relationship with her) many teachers would be willing to reach out to faculty that they know well and get input as to whether their student would be “in the ballpark” as a prospective applicant.

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So Kickstarter doesn’t take into account substantial talent or achievement in the arts? Does it ask if a supplement is being submitted for the arts?

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Not really- the graduation rate is the same or in some years higher if there are both 4th year and 5th years leaving a studio. The size of the studio every year is the barometer and every year the studios will admit more than they need due to trying to gage yield. My S22’s studio this year will be graduating 6 between 4th and 5th years, but it yielded everyone last year who was admitted so the studio got bigger than intended. So, there is fluctuation every year.

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This is what caught my eye from your intial post today (IU visit). This is really important. If he was not “in range” at IU, the teacher would have told him. While the schools can be marketing machines, I have found that in most cases the teachers are honest and helpful.

So you DO have a teacher at a selective music school, giving the old “warm and fuzzies”. A teacher can never makes promises…still they can be supportive, enthusiastic about your kid’s potential at their school if they are in the talent range. It seems like Oberlin was a similar experience (but I couldn’t tell for sure if there was a lesson). If these 2 schools are positive and supportive…he’s going in the right direction.

So now, you can extrapolate from these positive interactions and “assume” similar reactions at similar level music schools (not all, maybe…but a good number imho). This is how parents build a list. Sure, no music sschool is a safety…but if you are getting encouragement from the teachers…it becomes a bit of a numbers game. You try for 8ish well-researched, teacher supportive schools and you’ll get some acceptances.

I found it difficult to “believe” what the music teachers/professionals were telling me at first…and looked for some numbers to grab on to. But those interactions with the faculty (and the feel of the campus) are really important.

It is a bit of an art and takes a lot of trusting the gut (of a 17 or 18 year old…lol). But it does work best that way. You can do all the searching and analyzing…but in the end, your kid needs to click with the teacher, the campus and the program…and there are no stats for that.

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I will say that IU is not a musical safety, but I think it would be an extremely likely admit academically. There are options for non-music majors to take classes and lessons and such, so although it would not be the ideal situation, I think that there is a likely on your original list. Of course, if the piano teacher was positive at the trial lesson, then that’s better odds for the Jacobs admission.

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I think it is based solely on GPA, test scores and historical data from the school, and doesn’t take into account arts (or athletics, or legacy, or other big factors). At the broad levels it does track with actual admissions each year as I mentioned, but of course for individual kids it might be more or less helpful. It was helpful for my older two daughters (one was focused on math and the other undecided) but it will be less helpful for my son. Maybe for the non-auditioned schools it will be helpful, and maybe even not as positive as it could be given that his “extra curriculars” are very high level.

@anotheroboemom Thanks, that is a good idea. We have a good relationship so I’ll ask for her input as we go along and she is already connecting with faculty she knows. She is fond of him and has a high opinion of him, I think it’s too high given the admissions landscape (“why don’t you just send him to Yale?”). But she’s willing to help.

@baribassmom That makes sense. He’s also heard from a couple of potential teachers he reached out to that they are planning to retire in the next couple of years so I wonder how one thinks about new faculty? Do they start with nothing and add a bunch of kids all at once?

@bridgenail This is a good point, he will get a feel as it goes along based on whether the trial lessons go well. The Jacobs lesson was really good, it was scheduled for an hour but they ended up spending an hour and a half (I wasn’t sure whether to pay 1.5X! The teacher said no, just the agreed rate). Oberlin was not a lesson, my son only sat in on currently enrolled student’s lesson, so my son was clear that he liked the teacher but the teacher doesn’t have a feel for my son.

I think I’ll start to think about two parallel lists. First, auditioned conservatories within colleges (will aim for six? total where he had good/“warm and fuzzy” trial lesson feedback as long as he’s within the range or above academically, with at least two? that are safety-ish). Second, colleges of arts and sciences with good music programs but no audition, with a piano/horn/composition portfolio (maybe two likelies, two targets, handful of reaches?).

If he applies dual degree to college that has a conservatory within (like IU, or BU, or Northwestern for example) and is not accepted at the conservatory, will the college of arts and sciences look at his application more favorably (a math major with a strong music interest), less favorably (they might judge he’s less likely to come?) or independent of the conservatory? I suppose it is different from school to school.

I can tell I’m starting to overthink. I will check in again later. I really appreciate the support. This round of thinking was super helpful in showing that I was over-reliant on Kickstart and didn’t realize it, there are other things to rely on (private teacher and trial lesson feedback) and that I need to add non-auditioned schools with strong music programs.

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No- this happens from time to time and also teachers take sabbaticals or do temp assessments at other schools. Generally the studio stays together with the new faculty, but I’m sure if an individual student wanted to move studios, they could, provided there is space.

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My DD is a freshman VP at Bard. DM me if he ever wants to visit. My DD would be happy to show him around campus and the Conservatory.

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