<p>Tuba-
I actually wasn’t responding to your post, not sure I had even read it when I wrote my post. My point wasn’t that Julliard or NEC or whatever are the place to go, far from it, my point was that the right school for student depends on the student, the instrument and what they are planning to do:). There are plenty of kids who go to Juilliard, Curtis, etc who may have done better going someplace else, and there are kids who go to another program who would have benefited from a Juilliard or NEC or Curtis… The real point is that the idea of ranking conservatories or music schools within an LAC or university is kind of a wasted effort, because those rankings don’t work for every student the same way:).</p>
<p>It is in some ways some of the thinking on the academic side of things, where people believe if you get into let’s say Harvard or Princeton, that that is going to guarantee a great job or whatever, whereas if you go to a ‘lesser’ school you will never achieve, which is hogwash. Likewise, there are people who think because they get into a Juilliard or Curtis, because they have won X competitions, that they are going to be a star musician when they get out there automatically, that where they went to school is going to make everyone throw themselves at their feet, which obviously isn’t true (there is a flaw with the academic analogy, for some non music jobs, if you don’t go to a top 10 school it is next to impossible to get them to look at you, specifically in things like international finance, IB, and some other inbred occupations. With music it is different, other then the level of training you might get or not get, it doesn’t matter, because jobs generally are based on auditions and the like (there is obviously networking in things like freelance gigs, and being at a program with a large network of musicians can help with that). </p>
<p>I could see some cases where having a Juilliard or Curtis background, for example, might help if someone is teaching and trying to attract students, parents who know nothing else about music probably have heard of them, whereas if you say university of wala wala graduate or rutgers graduate, they might think “hmm,not big time” (same way that members of well known or relatively well known orchestras get students, even if they aren’t particularly good teachers, know of one woman, a member of the NY Phil, who teaches locally and having seen her students, most people shake their head about her as a teacher).</p>
<p>But for most music jobs, it ends up being how good the person is as a musician, and that can come from many different paths.</p>