Author: brycon
Date: 2022-03-07 23:00
Just watched the video. Thank you for the research!
Universities and conservatories no doubt traffic in the survivorship fallacy. And some admissions material is outright misleading: I recently saw an infographic from Berklee claiming 75% of alumni are employed in the performing arts (yeah, sure... "employed").
I think that many administrators see the crux of the issue as stagnating U.S. birthrates leading to increased competition among educational institutions for fewer students. Anecdotally, I see the schools with great financial aid and/or prestige getting far more competitive and therefore selective and second or third tier programs becoming far less selective. Schools are doing everything they can to hold it together and stay financially viable, which, in this case, means pushing success stories from 20 plus years ago to make potentially crippling debt more palatable (or viewing international cultural centers, such as China and Korea, as pipelines for new students). And you're right, it's morally dubious: how's an 18 year old, perhaps with parents who don't understand the music industry or a teacher who hasn't been in touch with it for several decades, supposed to make a good decision here?
But this phenomenon isn't confined to music. U.S. educational institutions are suffering smaller applicant pools and significant budget cuts. And education, then, has shifted from a credence good to a search good: that is, it isn't viewed as a good in and of itself but rather as a mechanism for achieving some other good (an orchestral position, a middle-class income, etc.). Schools have therefore become increasingly corporatized, as seen in the ever expanding middle-management administrator cohort, student evaluation processes, cutting of unprofitable degree programs, etc.
So schools are giving students a corporate schtick and selling success stories. But in the case of music, success in a field that most Americans don't care about doesn't amount to financial success.
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The Clarinet BBoard
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