New School was one of the four music schools that my son ended up applying to a few years ago and, as I mentioned, he has several friends there now. One of his friends was admitted to the Harvard/NEC joint program and turned it down for New School, which blows my mind to be honest, but says something about the attractiveness of the New School program. In any event, with the caveat that it’s been a few years since my son applied, here are some thoughts.
New School had the most unstructured of the jazz programs my son looked at, which might be either a good thing or a bad thing, depending on the student. It allows a great deal of flexibility – it’s a bit of a chart your own course type of thing – which can be great for the self-directed and motivated student. But my son says it’s also possible to drift and not do much of anything there if you’re not self-directed and motivated. They facilitate access to a fairly impressive array of resources, but it’s up to the student to take advantage of those resources. For example, their “faculty” list is a mile-long list of performing jazz musicians (here’s a link: http://www.newschool.edu/jazz/faculty-az/). My understanding is that the students are free to contact anyone on the list to try to make arrangements for lessons and, if the musician is willing to take them on, they can enroll for lessons through the school. But I don’t know how much, if anything, the school does to persuade the preferred teacher to agree to take on any given student. Just as an example of some of the names on the list for piano (in alphabetical order): Kenny Barron, Bruce Barth, George Cables, Gerald Clayton, Taylor Eigsti, Aaron Goldberg, Fred Hersch, Vijay Iyer, Frank Kimbrough, Aaron Parks, Edward Simon, Glenn Zaleski. Those are just names that jumped out as familiar to me – my guess is that there are others on the list who would be familiar to your son. And they continue to attract some of the best high school jazz musicians from around the country, so there’s a great pool of talented kids to play with.
I don’t know about student housing – at least one of my son’s friends there lives off campus – but I know they’re close to completion on (or maybe just completed) a fairly major new building, so you could ask whether that includes housing. As @musicprnt says, the location is near NYU, in the heart of the NYC jazz scene. It’s a much smaller school than NYU, so my guess is that the bureaucracy is easier to navigate. And if they’re offering a joint degree program, I expect that access to the liberal arts school has to be built into the program. If you and your son are able to do it, I would think a revisit would be great to get more information about the school and talk with current students about their day to day experiences. (And you could do a revisit at NYU too.) If that’s not possible, I’m sure you can ask for more information from the admissions office, and maybe they could set your son up with some students to talk with by phone. Best of luck with the decision! As I said before, I think any of the choices will be a good one.
