My student was a percussionist – orchestral with a highly accomplished youth symphony, jazz, marching, plus rock band with his pals, individual and group awards at the state level etc. We researched music opportunities at a lot of LACs, including meeting with percussion faculty at Lawrence and others. Before his junior year, he had played with the idea of music school but by junior year, he realized he wasn’t talented or dedicated enough, to go that route. Admission as a music student to a competitive program such as IU Jacobs or Northern Texas is analogous to athletic recruiting – auditions, very few spots, the best programs are not necessarily at the most well-known or prestigious schools. So finding schools which are safety/match/reach becomes much trickier. Throw in the OP’s interest in CS – a competitive admissions program at many schools – and the formula gets even more complicated.
For instance, Northern Texas is one of the top percussion programs in the country – for a student seeking admission as a percussionist, it is probably a reach, even though the “regular” student might otherwise classify it a safety. Similar calculus for IU Jacobs School of Music – a reach for admission as a percussionist, perhaps a match or safety for “regular” admission, but you still have to consider access to CS which, from the recent CS grads we know, may not be as competitive to declare a major but is competitive to stay in the major and complete it.
I would recommend the student do some research and soul searching on priorities and goals to help formulate the list and classify schools as safety/match/reaches. If the OP’s student is a “Jennifer” in the “Double Degree Dilemma,” then schools like IU and Northern Texas wouldn’t need to stay on the list – those music programs are generally for students dedicated to a career in performance. As I read “Jennifer,” a school with traditional, “liberal arts” education and good music department and student performance opportunities is the priority, and not a specialized music performance program.
This is the first time I hear this suggestion and yet it is a great fit. They happen to have a great percussion ensemble and great teacher. And of course, Williams is a solid place. Thanks
Tufts would be a good choice. It does not have a music school, but an excellent and active music dept. CS is excellent.
Oberlin’s Musical Studies BA is a perfect compromise (he could minor too) and if he liked Schick’s presentation, Oberlin’s percussion is progressive I believe. I have heard good things about SUNY Stoneybrook and U. of Alaska Fairbanks for percussion too. For UCSD check and see how much access there is for undergrads to Schick and to the amazing doctoral students as well.
He should still apply to Brown. You just never know. Or any top school, because music can sometimes make the difference, if he submits that music supplement.
Take a look at Clark U. and College of Wooster too.
You have a long list already. Amherst and Williams are as selective as Brown, and Wesleyan and Tufts are up there too. They are all “little Ivies.”
You still have a number of schools that DO have BM programs. If he isn’t doing a double degree, he really needs to delve into the issues mentioned before. Or maybe he prefers to keep all options open at the moment. He can do that with applications and decide when accepted.
ps I love that he watched Schick’s presentation and enjoyed it. I know a few percussionists who got doctorates in contemporary classical percussion and have university jobs.
Utah may be a good safety for CS and offers a choice of (audition-based) BA in Music and a BMus. It’s also relatively cheap because you can get residency after the first year. D is doing a BFA in ballet and will complete both the BFA and a BSc (with Honors thesis) in four years.
If you would like to consider the requirements for two concentrations at colleges with “open” curricula (e.g., Brown, Amherst, Hamilton, Grinnell), then it appears that, of the 32 semester-length courses required to graduate, from 19 to 22 courses might be needed to complete concentrations in music and computer science. This would leave two to three semesters available for electives or study away. With respect to the difficulty of this schedule, it might not exceed that typical for students at these schools.
Schools with BMs are still on the list because the boy has not ruled out a double degree yet. I have my opinions but I want to just give him the info I collect and let him make the decisions. Also, I am trying to be very inclusive. As we get more comments and especially as we look more closely into each school, a lot of them will come off the list. I will check on Schick’s availability at UCSD but what you say makes sense. I will look also into the other ones you mentioned.
Thanks for encouraging us on Brown. You are right Williams and Amherst are also selective. I guess he needs to decide how many reach schools he wants to include. His SAT is 1470 but plans to take it a second time so it may get better. His grades….oh God I don’t want to think about it. Last year he had all As and one B+ but this year’s online learning brought out the worst in him. He needs a very inclusive list in terms of selectivity.
If you like Boulder, then as Twoin18 suggests, consider U of Utah as well - many of the same strengths (great CS and music) and weaknesses (diversity is equally “meh” at both), but Utah is much more affordable and its honors college, if he ends up having the stats, is more cohesive.
I don’t think anyone has mentioned Ohio State yet, but it might be worth a look. In addition to the traditional BM in music performance, there is a BA that is still a performance degree, designed to accommodate double-majors… and there’s also a BS in Music with a track that specifically combines music and CS. (It may tilt a little toward music-specific computing, but it doesn’t seem to be exclusively that - it does include a real core sequence in CS.)
St. Olaf was my first thought when I read your post. The Math/CS department is particularly strong, and the music program is outsized for the size of the school, making it one of the few smaller schools that may have sufficient “critical mass” to provide good opportunities in a low-volume specialty like orchestral percussion, even for a non-major. Lawrence also, but St. Olaf is more than twice the size and may have a little more muscle in terms of CS.
Maybe U of Richmond? They’re cross-disciplinary-friendly and offer music performance scholarships to music minors as well as majors, and excellent performing arts generally… and there’s cross-registration with VCU which has a strong percussion program.
You seem like you’re doing a great first filter and finding a good range of possibilities!
It is not that we like Boulder. At some point, someone may have suggested it and it looked like a decent safety. We need to look more closely at that list (it is too long anyway). We care a lot about diversity.
We had looked at St Olaf and Lawrence but not at Ohio State and U of Richmond. Thanks!
My daughter applied there, and agonized over the required short essay about how she would contribute to the diversity of their campus community. She’s Eurasian, but she didn’t feel like that alone made her desirable as a “diverse” candidate. She labored over finding something meaningful to say - feeling like she didn’t measure up to their apparent commitment to diversity.
Months later, her acceptance packet came in the mail. The envelope was edge-to-edge color-printed on both sides with a vibrant scene from a football game - a sea of fans cheering in the stands. After my daughter’s initial “YAY I GOT IN!” moment, she squinted at the envelope, becoming more and more offended as she scanned the cheering crowd. There wasn’t a single face that was clearly non-white, in the entire scene. She couldn’t believe she had stressed over their diversity essay!
They do, I suppose, get honesty points for not photoshopping in Black students, like UWisconsin famously did. But yeah, while I had thought of Utah as not-diverse-enough and hadn’t thought of Boulder the same way, the truth is that their racial demographics are nearly identical, mandatory diversity essay notwithstanding!
A nice tool for comparing economic diversity, if you’re not familiar, is this NYT database:
Utah has more than 4x as many students as Boulder who come from the bottom 20% in family income. FWIW.
College Navigator - University of Colorado Boulder indicates that Colorado undergraduates are 67% White… also 13% Hispanic or Latino (some of whom may appear White in a photo). Even with only 1 out of 3 to 5 students being “visibly” non-White, it seems like a random grouping of enough students would be unlikely to have not “a single face that was clearly non-white, in the entire scene.” Given that most universities want to appear maximally welcoming to all possible student demographics, to the point that photos will be carefully selected to show a wide range of visible student demographics, that seems like an odd choice by Colorado’s marketing department.
You have to wonder why the would have to do that instead of taking a lot of photos and picking the ones that showed the diversity they wanted to show.
Or perhaps the social scene at the school is racially/ethnically segregated enough that it was difficult to find groups of students exhibiting different race/ethnicity to take photos of?
That was my impression - that maybe it’s the football fans that are overwhelmingly white? To be fair, there were faces that could possibly have been Hispanic/Latinx or mixed-ethnicity… just none that struck us as definitively “of color.” But that was exactly our reaction - how does Admissions care enough about this issue to require the essay, but not enough to put a few seconds’ thought into the optics of their acceptance packet? (This was in 2017 - can’t speak for whether it’s changed. And the Wisconsin incident was 20 years ago - they just haven’t lived it down yet. University of Wisconsin Booklet Photoshopped to Add Black Student | Snopes.com )
Regardless of their marketing strategies (of all colleges) you can’t argue with Chetty’s study. I had seen it before but I had not checked the schools on our list.
That page does say that University of Wisconsin had only about 10% minorities then (versus 21% domestic minorities among undergraduates now). Given the Midwest’s reputation for racial segregation, perhaps it really was hard to find and photograph groups of students that had the appearance of racial/ethnic diversity. But then “cheating” with photo editing was a “solution” that was worse than the “problem”.
My S22 is a percussionist who is split on music and health sciences. We feel strongly he needs to be at a SLAC so he can easily switch gears if necessary and get that personal touch. I thought I’d share our list in case it gives you some ideas even though he’s not as strong of a student as your child. U of Puget Sound, Pacific Lutheran, Lawrence, St. Olaf, Knox, Clark, Bard, Loyola New Orleans. If he were a better student, I’d have Oberlin on there, too. He’s also a recruited athlete, but lord knows if he’ll have time for that…
Some of those schools have conservatories (e.g., Lawrence U. and Bard C.). One would think those LACs would be ideal for musicians also wanting to major in arts and sciences.
“Given the Midwest’s reputation for racial segregation…” Just curious, what part of the country would you say has a handle on racial inequality and implicit bias?
Probably none, but some places are worse than others in terms of how racially segregated they are in various measures (where many Midwestern cities / metro areas tend to show up near the top of the “most segregated” lists) and observations.
