That’s not how I read it. I read it as music doesn’t need any more justification, explanation or defense than any other major. People can say “pre-med” which isn’t actually a major and a goal that is more often abandoned than fulfilled, and yet still it sounds important and official. This real life parent apparently didn’t bat an eye at a creative joint liberal arts major with no direct employment path (not to say that the D won’t be well educated and employable) but believes that music isn’t a serious and viable major. I think it illustrates the point wonderfully.
I thought it was a great piece too! And my son is a philosophy major who wants to make his career in music, so music is his “practical” pursuit. 
Enjoyable to read but I have two problems with it: one, college does not have to be vocational and career does not have to be related to major. Music majors can get into all kinds of fields after graduation, in or out of music, can go to grad school or, with the proper prerequisites done before or after graduation, can enter medical, law, business or nursing school etc.
Two, it is possible to graduate with a degree in music without ever touching an instrument. A music major does not always involve performance as part of the curriculum.
This blog entry accepts the premise that college work is geared to a job after graduation, which is the main argument AGAINST majoring in music by most folks. The world is changing but it is still okay to spend those 4 years on something you love, without regard to a specific kind of job afterward. And a bachelor’s in music, whether BM or BA or BS or BFA, is a bachelor’s degree like any other.
The discipline and work ethic of music majors is recognized and respected by grad and professional schools and many employers.
@ compmom-
You are correct about college, but one of the unfortunate sides of globalization and competition has been that people these days truly believe all kinds of things, that if kids in high school take a challenging class and don’t do well in it, it will ruin them, there are kids obsessing about GPA’s in middle school (!), and there is this whole attitude that if you don’t follow the ‘right’ path, that you will be doomed to obscurity…There was a piece on NPR the other night interviewing a guy who had taught at Yale (left there in 2008) and has written a book whose title I believe is “A nation of Sheep”, that basically argues that the whole education system is being tracked around getting kids into one of the elite colleges, because that is the only way you can have ‘success’, and worse, once there, that only certain things are ‘worthwhile’ studying…and stats back this up, he said the most popular majors at the elite schools are Economics and Finance, and that these schools are bemoaning the fact that whole areas of study have a hard time getting students to major in them (which the response to should be "look in the mirror, guys; your admissions departments have become the equivalent of fantasy football, where all that matters is statistics, and the same people that are so good at gaming the system, taking classes they only can get A’s in, doing well on standardized tests, doing only EC’s they think will get them into a great school, so what do you expect?..the analogy with fantasy football is apt, there are players who are great for fantasy football who as players overall aren’t so great, for a lot of reasons)… To a certain extent, it also reflects the large and growing population of kids who either immigrated from or are the children of Asian immigrants, who come from countries where what college you go to and what you study determines pretty much your whole future, you go to a second tier school in China, major in Chinese history, and you likely will not have much of a career in front of you…
Interestingly, employers are starting to bemoan the same thing. Obviously, with things like computer science or engineering, where there is specific training in the program you directly need to work as an engineer (though with computer science, much less so, in large part because computer science is not aimed at professional programming, it is more about the theory behind computers and software, it is aimed at producing the guys who develop new languages and operating systems, not routing programming, and there are plenty of professional programmers who are self taught or took some classes in programming and went that route; engineering is very different, it is a lot more specific). But with many jobs, what you do on the job is so different than what you learn in school that it almost doesn’t matter; plus a lot of companies are waking up to the fact that the kids who choose ‘the right path’ are often not risk takers, they often aren’t equipped to do anything but ‘what is the right way’, and the kids who are majoring in things like Economics or finance or business are being seen by many businesses as not necessarily being the type of employee they want. I was shocked to read the other day that Goldman Sachs, who believe me was one of the ‘if you don’t go to an Ivy and major in the right subjects, don’t even talk to us’, was looking for non traditional students, and they specifically mentioned music majors.
I have been fortunate, maybe it is the kind of people I am around, who generally are very different themselves, tech guys from a variety of backgrounds, and so forth, but when people hear my son is a serious music student, they are very supportive, not just to him, but to me as well. One of the things that I say, and no doubter will ever shake me of this, is that one of the values of music (or other ‘not practical fields’ ) is it shows someone who is willing to go for something that is difficult, take a risk, where the risk of ‘failing’ is pretty high, and still going for it. Who is a better candidate for a job, a kid whose parents made him follow a certain path, if he had a passion for something (let’s say music) he could only do that if it furthered the goal of getting into an elite university, or a kid made the decision to follow his/her passion? Who is a better student, the kid who only took classes in college they thought were ‘useful’ and ‘easy enough’ so he/she could have a 4.0, or someone who took risks and was willing to try things outside their comfort zone?
Even Google, who for all their brilliance had these weird ideas about hiring, started realizing that hiring 4.0’s only from elite schools wasn’t getting them the results they wanted, one of their head geeks said something to the effect that they weren’t seeing new ideas, rather were seeing someone telling them how great the ideas they had come up with, rather than suggesting new ones.
What I told my son was this is the perfect age to experiment, to try and find what made him tick, that it isn’t a time for other people to tell him what is good for him, what he ‘has to do’ to be ‘successful’ and so forth, and that the reality is even with all the hype about going to ivy league schools (something he saw a lot of going to the pre college music program he was in, lot of the kids there were the product of hyper parents where the only acceptable goal was to get into an ivy league or similar college), that success has many parameters and one of the big ones is doing something you enjoy, whatever it is, and that that drives the hard work and so forth that makes it happen, and that given the amount of work he had to do with music just to get into a studio with a top level teacher, work that was towards a nebulous goal (sorry, but academic admissions pale against admissions for music school via audition, there is a pretty well trod path with academic admissions whereas with music, there is no such thing…how much practice is enough? How do you judge where you are musically, when all the hashmarks are subjective?),he already had a leg up, and the goal only becomes more nebulous, as verus “take academic courses in high school, get good grades, do EC’s, take SAT and other tests and do well, and you get in”…and then in college, it is ‘here are the courses for the major, get good grades on them, get good grades overall’ and it is likely that you will find a job, there is a kind of track to it. Yes, the interview and hiring process for ‘regular’ jobs is nebulous to a certain extent, there are no guarantees, but compared to music it is as clear as day IMO:).
In my many years working, one of the most valuable things in an employee is being able to deal with things that are not well defined, working in places where strategy is determined on the fly, where the environment changes rapidly due to a competitors products or a legislators pen, or where the design of functionality may be less than clear, having the ability to deal with a nebulous goal and pull it off is extremely valuable, and music students (specifically music performance students) deal with that the whole course of their studies and then in their attempt to make a career of music (if they do), and that is valuable life skills.
=D>
Thank you for the kind words re: the blog post. I appreciate compmom’s view above as valuable input. The intended premise of the blog post was actually that there really are no ‘real’ majors (vs. ‘not real majors’) in that the first four years of college (well, especially the first four years) are about the kids/young adults figuring out who they are. As they progress through college, they begin to hone in on interests and (hopefully, in my view) begin to weigh the work/dedication/requirments/love/passion/etc. involved in various paths. These paths could be musical, philosophical, lawyerly, doctorly, plumber-ly… doesn’t matter. They may lead to a job, career, graduate school, a gap year… who knows! I also completely agree that having studied something in college does not mean that your ‘life major’ is going to be the same thing (and you may even change careers a number of times to boot!)). I can honestly say that my son is gaining incredible experience in a wide variety of areas, including a lot of bobbing and weaving that will serve him well no matter what he chooses to do as he moves forward. But I will say that, dang… the kid sure loves music.
Thank you all again for reading the blog post. Your encouragement really means a lot. (jazzpianodad, I laughed out loud at your comment!)
@mommabass - good stuff. I have a S who is a senior in composition and a D who is going to major in art next fall. So I have gotten an earful of the “not a REAL major” stuff about both of them. The S was most certainly going to major in music, or he would not have gone to college at all. I made sure he went to a “regular university” and not a conservatory, in case he found that music at the college level was not what he expected or wanted. Silly me! It’s EXACTLY what he wanted. He aced his theory classes and has pretty much loved all of his music classes while hating his gen. ed. classes. He knows as much about the structure and history of music as any history major or physics major knows about their field! As a parent I am thrilled to see him GAINING KNOWLEDGE, which is what I always thought college was about! What on Earth could be “wrong” about that? I have been awestruck at the music he has composed and his ongoing passion for the work. His definition of success is not based on money, but on getting his music heard. He is driven to do it and I know he will. He may eventually go to grad school, but only because he wants to increase his knowledge, not because he wants to teach or feels he needs the credential. In the meantime, he has landed an internship that will eventually become a job working for a studio that does music and sound design for movies and TV shows. That is what he wanted to do! It’s not a miracle, it happened because he went to the college he belonged in, in the city he belonged in, studied what he was passionate about, networked, took whatever gigs and work he could find and built a resume. And the job found him! He has also learned a ton about the realities of the music business, about personal budgeting, managing landlords and roommates and checking accounts, trying and failing to launch a band, and surviving on a minimum wage fast food job.
Our younger D is an artist, and was originally determined to study animation and visual effects. Not because she had done that or really was passionate about it, but because she likes animated movies and thought that this was the most likely area for an art major to actually obtain gainful employment after college. But the more art she has done (she is ridiculously talented at drawing and painting and printmaking), the more shows she has entered and won, the more colleges we visited, the more she thinks she wants to just explore art at the college level, get better at it, and worry later about an area of specialty. Her brother’s experience has been influential to her on this, as is his girlfriend who is an amazing artists studying at a tiny art school. Also on our college vists we have talked to many art students who started in one are and switched after finding their passion. I now think perhaps we dodged a bullet with her. She is probably not going to to to the school with the bigtime animation program that was her original dream school (and costs a fortune) and instead go to our local university that has a first-rate art school, and spend her first two years in their foundation program really finding out what she wants to do.
Great story, @honestmom!!!
@saintfan I’m looking forward to your next profile picture. They’re great.
back in the day when I was in high school, my very wise teacher said something
that stuck in my mind forever:(this was back when the USSR posed a real threat
to the US and nuclear winter scared the bejesus out of everybody)
“if you have irreplaceable skills, you’ll always eat, even after world war three”
He said “doctors, engineers, classical musicians, Chinese chefs, hunters, farmers,
seamstress, etc, etc.” He added: “but not lawyers and politicians” 
Mommabass LOVED the article. As a parent of 4 kids (my 4th is a HS junior who is intent on going the music performance route) all of whom have started at music majors, this is the absolute same philosophy I have had. Two of my 3 boys switched majors, but my #2 child will graduate with his music degree this summer. I will miss when the music has gone from my house
The problem is in these days college has turned from being what others have said, a chance for young people to expand out and learn new things, into being in a sense a glorified trade school for a ‘real career’, people see it through the narrow glasses of fields like engineering, comp science and the like, or maybe accounting, that these are ‘real skills’ (the reality is that unless kids have actually worked in engineering or programming before getting a job, they likely will lack a great deal, too, comp sci is not necessarily a ‘practical’ field of study, some is practical, like data structures and the like, others like theory of computation, numerical analysis and the like, not so much). Unless they have changed comp sci significantly to when I got my degrees, real world programming is very, very different and kids still have a lot to learn, often the languages they used in school are not used where they will work (that might have changed, with Java becoming so common in schools). I see the difference all the time with kids coming in from India, a lot of the so called colleges turning out “CS” graduates are basically trade schools, they teach them java programming and the like, but they don’t have the liberal arts education and they also don’t have much of the theoretical stuff you learn in comp science (basic stuff, like being able to describe what a bubble sort is or how it works).
Hopefully that idea of college will continue on, that people will realize that college to teach “practical skills” only is likely going to turn out drones, not thinking people. I was shocked not long ago when Goldman Sachs, who when it comes to their bankers is one of the most uptight, snobby firms out there (ie you don’t come out of a top 10 business school, forget interviewing there), suddenly said they were trying to find kids who studied unconventional things, and music was one of the things they mentioned, saying they were tired of all the kids they hired thinking the same way, so maybe there is hope:)
Another kind of example of this, friend of my S’s got a BM in Piano (graduates this year) from a top school, decided he didn’t want to do music going forward, applied to law school after taking the LSAT. Ended up with two offers full ride or almost full ride from Cornell and BU law schools:)