Our big mistake

College Majors Music Major
1

At this point in the process I wanted to share a tactical mistake we made in the whole college application process. S is a high achieving student - top 5% of his class, lots of APs with good scores, varsity soccer on a highly-ranked 6A team as well as club soccer, and music.

We made the decision after he took the SAT in June to live with the results. I knew he had another 80-100 points in him, his math was excellent, but he had room in the CR portion to improve. We discussed and decided his time would be better spent on audition prep.

In retrospect, I think that has cost him some academic money. He’s done well with artistic merit funds, but since he is applying primarily to music schools within universities I feel like the academic side could have been better. In fact, I’m pretty sure it cost him admission to Johns Hopkins where he was applying for a dual degree with Peabody. (Of course we will never know why he was rejected, but that SAT is the glaring outlier on his application.)

So I just wanted to put this out there for future CC music applicants. If we were smarter we would have looked at the types of merit aid at the various institutions and set very specific goals based on that information. The audition is obviously the most important thing, but it’s not the only thing.

Fortunately S has great options within our budget. But it would be nice to have done that one piece differently.

2

I agree with you. It’s difficult to balance academics and music but the SAT scores still matter to universities. With superscoring, most students will improve at least one component by taking the test twice. I think it’s important to start the whole process sooner rather than later so it doesn’t intrude on pre-screens although, in our town, there always seemed to be band/choir conflicts on test dates.

3

Without knowing scores (and of course privacy matters!) it is hard to comment on this. Scores in the 700’s (old SAT) might make a difference versus high 600’s, for instance, but once benchmarks are reached there is no difference really between a 720 and 750. Especially for a kid with the other positives, and music. And who knows whether prepping would have increased scores- or if scores were the reason for the JH decision.

There is also no way to really know: did the additional time on audition prep bring merit aid for music and admission to schools that might not have happened had he focused on SAT’s?

And was the experience of senior year better without stressing about scores?

I can see the wisdom of researching academic versus merit aid at certain schools. For the future music families for whom you are posting, that is a great idea.

Perhaps if a kid has his or her heart set on a super competitive university like Johns Hopkins, you have a point- but only if admission to the music side at Peabody was a pretty sure thing.

I honestly think your family and son made a really valid choice. Of course, I am biased: none of my kids prepped for SAT’s because they were too busy doing stuff they loved to do, and it worked out overall.

Hope your son ends up at a place where he is happy!!

4

I second this advice and also wish we had done more research ahead of time! My S would have gotten double the academic scholarship money at one university ($20K a year vs. $10K) with 10 additional SAT points. I am not sure whether or not he had it in him but it would have been worth the try. The other tip I would offer from this perspective is to look up the list of schools which meet 100% of need to see if any of them have music schools worth considering (JHU and NU are two of them). Drastic difference in the scholarship aid offered between the school to which we applied from the list vs. the others. I’m not sure if there’s a good way to find out whether and what sort of music merit aid might be offered before applying although I have heard from schools that more “in demand” instruments needed to fill out ensembles tend to get offered more.

5

I think this is a helpful discussion as the scores can be overlooked a little because of the importance of audition prep. But I love what compmom wrote and I want to second it! And minimizing stress, especially with auditions looming, is always the best decision. If this is your big mistake BassTheatreMom, you’re doing great!

6

@compmom “And was the experience of senior year better without stressing about scores?”

Yes, yes a thousand times YES!

So you are right. S does have multiple great choices within our budget. I don’t know if time spent on additional test prep would have detracted from audition prep and he would have lost music money that way. And of course the balance is different for every school. So this is food for thought for future folks, more than a “you should do it this way.”

7

@compmom I don’t believe that is what the OP is getting at.

OP is referencing qualifying for academic merit aid.

And FYI, Peabody controls its own admissions process. It’s not even as remotely stringent academically to be admitted at Peabody as at JHU.

8

@ClarinetDad16 Yes, S is waiting on Peabody results. The dual degree option appears to be off the table with the JHU rejection. S will be able to take classes at JHU if admitted to Peabody, but not get a degree from them.

I get @compmom’s point - there are only so many hours in the day - time spent trying to get scores that will bring academic merit is time not spent prepping for auditions that could bring music merit. Everything’s a trade off without Hermione’s time turner. :slight_smile:

9

ClarinetDad, my post was a response to the topic of focusing on test prep to gain academic merit aid versus spending that time on audition prep. And in this case, the son applied to both Peabody and JHU.

I was just trying to make the point that in hindsight, it is easy to have regrets no matter what you do :slight_smile:

And having watched three kids endure senior year, two of them in the performing arts, I strongly believe that stress and health are major things to consider.

One more thing folks… A student can do some quick prep (just reading the tips for test taking for instance) and do a repeat SAT and often the scores will go up just because the test was taken before and kids just get better with their strategies. That approach would not take up much time and avoids a lengthy test prep, either in a course or at home.

I always like a moderate path if one can be found…

But then again taking the SAT on a Saturday can mean missing some music!

ps missing aid by 10 points is tough!

10

This is certainly a post that hit home for me and made me think about what we would have done differently (if anything). For D, she was a very high achieving student but SAT scores were so-so when she took them as a junior (and I sincerely mean this!). She decided not to retake, and it was the right decision FOR HER. Took a lot of stress off her summer, and allowed her to focus on what she loved the most -singing. Undoubtedly, her success in prescreen process was a consequence of this decision. In addition, it kept her from the mind games kids at our uber competitive large suburban district fall prey to with trying for perfect SAT’s and 5’s on AP exams … (which STILL leads to rejection and heartbreak for many of these students because so many applicants actually have this resume!).

11

Spring is around the corner and so is buyer’s remorse and regrets. Just when you think the painful process is over…you have to process all the regrets and muscle through buyer’s remorse once a decision is made.

Still, the hindsight comments are well worth it to future parents.

12

Agreed that there’s a trade-off with stress and that should be considered! And, yes, less time spent on preparing music might have led to less successful auditions and fewer offers. I do think it’s worthwhile to see if there’s information available on available scholarships and criteria at any schools under serious consideration (while noting that some places, like Indiana, don’t offer the same merit awards to students who apply to the music school). That said, while he’s still waiting on one official offer and and one merit aid letter, S feels good about where things stand at this point. So I guess it has worked out!

13

This was a hard balance for us to strike, as well, though I’m sure it’s much more important for double degree candidates.

There was so much advice out there last year about new SAT vs. old SAT and many articles suggested taking the ACT instead for those in the Class of 2017. We followed that advice but it turned out the new SAT was a significantly better test for my son – once we realized that he only had one shot left to take it and wouldn’t you know, he was quite ill on test day but he STILL did better on that SAT than on his ACTs, so I’m almost certain a second SAT would have come in higher.

I don’t regret the minimal test prep - it definitely cut the stress and allowed him the time for practice. And looking at S’s results, I think there is only one school where that “mistake” had any effect on admissions or merit. A better score might have given him a few more options to apply to, but he didn’t really want those schools anyway for other reasons.

If we are including other mistakes, I have to mention that extra AP class in senior year. I didn’t want S to take it but he likes the subject matter and insisted. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a very time consuming class with a teacher that was a bad fit for S to boot, and it most definitely affected his audition prep, stress level, first semester grade and happiness even if it didn’t affect his results too much. In hindsight, he should have dropped it first quarter. We’ll never know if he might have gotten a bit more music merit at a few places if he had had that extra time back for practice, though. I would advise this year’s juniors to decide how many AP classes you think you can handle based on your success in junior year APs and then subtract at least one from that number because marching band + college/music school apps + audition prep is a brutal combination for fall of senior year. I’d also recommend kids talk to current seniors about AP workloads and teachers before signing up for senior year APs.

14

I hear you on the APs, and we dodged that bullet, @classicalsaxmom - the husband and I talked him into backing off on those this year and he only took music theory and econ/gov as APs this year (it helped that he took Calc BC, Chem and Physics AP classes as a junior).

But of course, his senior year courseload looks awfully light (aside from music theory and econ/govt, he is taking core english, soccer, orchestra and is the soccer coach’s aid). Maybe that light senior courseload kept him out of JHU!

So this is what I’m walking away with: Stop with the what-ifs or I will drive myself batty, LOL!

15

This list does not apply to BassTheaterMom’s son, but for future readers of this thread:
http://fairtest.org/university/optional

This list of schools that are test-optional or at least de-emphasize tests was truly eye-opening and one of my kids did apply without scores, with excellent admissions results. Some very top colleges are on this list.

Of course for conservatories, scores aren’t as important as auditions as we all know, so the list really applies mainly to only a segment of music applicants, including BA program applicants.

16

So many what-ifs!!! I think you did great @BassTheatreMom ! So much of this process is truly a big (albeit calculated) risk. We were lucky in a way, because my D doesn’t test well, and we KNEW it wouldn’t be worth the enormous amount of extra time it would take for her to try to seriously improve her test scores (with no guarantee of return). So we took a deep breath, decided to let her focus on audition prep and musical growth overall, and for us it worked well. But it could just as easily have been kind of a disaster, Lol! So we are thanking our lucky stars right now, while knowing a gap year could have been a reality. We also really vacillated about a college level English class (not AP…at a Community College…for transfer credits), but knew it would only transfer at a few of the schools she was looking at. In the end, D decided not to invest her time, and it’s a good thing she didn’t, because her top two choices now are high level LAC+Conservatories, and it wouldn’t have worked to bring along those credits. We got lucky!

17

Good point, @compmom – in fact my S applied test optional to 3 schools and got into all of them.

18

What I would add to this list is given how nebulous the whole process is be very careful in generalizing too much. It could be in a music program in a university where academic merit will be awarded, you would know that for example let’s say a 2000+ SAT would get the kid more academic aid, then yeah if he/she got a 1900 it might be worth retaking the test to try and bring it up to that level…but what if you don’t really know where that kicks in?

In a sense in this kind of sitation there is a zero sum game between getting your playing up to the right level while maintaining academics high enough not just to get admitted, but to get academic merit aid as well…and for example, if you concentrate on the academic, and increase that side of things, what will happen to the playing, if you play well enough to get in but at a level it decreases or minimizes your music merit aid, you may end up actually losing, perhaps if the kid put more time in the music the merit aid from that side would have been greater than any lost aid on the academic side…and one thing I have seen up close with friend’s of my son, that the stress of trying to mantain the academic side, especially where they attempt all the AP classes and so forth, getting high test scores, hurt their playing ability, it happened time and again, kids heading more for the academic saw their playing fall off (there are always exceptions).

One thing I would recommend, which comes up here time and again, is if you are doing the music school in a university, to contact the admissions departments on both sides and ask the kind of criteria used for awards, especially on the academic side of things, while they likely would tell you that awards change from year to year, etc, they might be able to tell you that for example, their highest level of academic awards are given to kids who are in the top X percentile of the SAT, are above Y in unweighted GPA, in x position in their class…and even if they won’t/can’t tell you, it doesn’t hurt to try. The most frustrating thing about this whole process, music and academic sides, is just how non transparent much of it is. For example, in the OP’s case, did the kid not get into JHU because his academics were off enough, or did he not get in because he was doing a double degree and they felt for whatever reasons that he wouldn’t be able to do that (ie that if he had applied to JHU without the music school, maybe he would have gotten in).

Having gone through this in UG, and now going through it with my son applying to grad schools, one of the things I can tell you is that music is full of the regrets for ‘the road not taken’, even though we’ll never know in any kind of fact whether path2 would have been better than path1 (kind of like the road less travelled, where we convince ourselves that any path we took was the road less travelled and it turned out great lol).

To quote the great poet Robert Burns, talking about a mouse he had unearthed on plowing a field:

Still, thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But Och! I backward cast my e’e,
On prospects drear!
An’ forward, tho’ I canna see,
I guess an’ fear!

19

Thanks, @musicprnt

I don’t think the dual degree affected Johns Hopkins, btw, for any future readers who are considering it. They have three admissions steps for the dual degree - JHU and Peabody separately, and then if they get into both, the two admissions groups get together and decide if they can handle the dual program and either admit or don’t admit to that. If they don’t get into the dual degree, they would then presumably have to choose between JHU or Peabody (or somewhere else, of course). I guess there could be a little yield protection going on, but with this specific program I really doubt it.

And I want to be clear that overall S, my husband, and I are as excited as can be about the options in front of S. I think there may have been a little academic money left on the table because of the SAT choice, but it appears it will affect our bottomline and not our ability to send S to any of these schools. We won’t have quite as nice of a condo in Boca when we hit our 70’s, that’s all.

20

Nice post BassTheaterMom!

Just want to add one more thing. It is easy to see, in hindsight, that this is all a lot more flexible than it seems :slight_smile:

What I mean is, the violinist who chooses an academic program may later go to conservatory for that MM. The singer who chooses a VP BM may later study Medieval Studies in grad school. The composer who chooses college may do a doctorate at a music school, while another composer, who went to UG conservatory, might study art history or go to med school. And any of these may just go work for a non-profit or start teaching or start functioning professionally in music.

It’s wonderful every year to read the results for all these young people who want to devote the next 4 years to music one way or the other.