<p>It would be difficult to rank these schools. All of them have at least a few excellent students and at least one well-known teacher. It might be easier to rank individual teacher studios in terms of the calibre of students and the competitiveness of admission, but that would not be very helpful, since the top studio might be a very bad fit for a particular violinist.</p>
<p>IU is the largest of them and has the most violin profs. The calibre of the students and profs probably has a larger range at IU than at most others, simply because of its size. While Bloomington is certainly by far the smallest of the cities you’ve mentioned (and had a distinctly hillbilly feel to parts of it which was shocking to my Canadian sensibilities), IU has vast amounts of cultural stuff happening right on campus and Indianapolis is only about 75 minutes away (although it is not a cultural hotbed compared to most of the cities on your list).</p>
<p>I hear less about CCM’s violinists than the other schools, but certainly there are fine students there.</p>
<p>Is there a reason why NEC is not on the list? In my mind, for violin, it is the equal or better of most of the schools on the list, but no more competitive for admissions than at least one or two.</p>