<p>My son is a senior and planning on studying Music Education, all the schools and websites we visit all mention scholarships. Can anyone give me realistic examples of what schools are offering? I hear that a lot of public schools will waive out of state tuition costs for out of state students and that is a great start, I've also heard of students receiving full tuition scholarships, room and board money etc, (the FULL RIDE). I also see some schools mention scholarships for as little as $500 per semester. I realize all this depends on how good a student and musician your child is and what instrument they play etc. Just wondering if realistic expectations are for a few thousand dollars a year or if I should go hunting for those schools that offer free tuition etc. My son had dinner with a former classmate of his last night who is transferring to a very expensive private university in Colorado and my son's friend said he is pretty much getting all tuition paid ($40,000+) per year and additional monies for room and board. I was basically expecting a few thousand dollars a year until I heard this. Was hoping some people could give examples of what their kids were offerred. Feel free to include as much information as possible, regarding school names, instruments and such. I don't want to get too nosy, but would like to get some idea of what others are receiving. Thanks in advance</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/music-major/1045522-master-list-music-school-acceptances-fall-2011-a.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/music-major/1045522-master-list-music-school-acceptances-fall-2011-a.html</a></p>
<p>The above is a link to the third thread from the top (2011 master list of music school acceptances). Many posters include their scholarships and one of the dad’s kept a running total and average value of the posted scholarships. You may also want to check past year’s acceptance threads for scholarship amounts.</p>
<p>General observations: 1. Bigger scholarships are often given at more expensive colleges (but often even the big scholarships leave a bigger amount left to pay).<br>
2. A given student can often get a bigger scholarship at a less prestigious school.</p>
<p>Somekidsdad: If you go to the master list of acceptances and scroll down to entry#7, you will open a spreadsheet that will list where students were accepted and if you scroll to the right you will see the self reported merit based scholarships. These were merit based scholarships and include academic as well as talent based amounts. Depending on your EFC, your child may qualify for additional grants from the schools. As you will see it is hard to predict how much might be awarded for talent but the academic scholarships tend to follow the guidelines the schools put in their scholarship information. Good luck and try to enjoy the time spent with your student during the audition process. It goes by quickly!</p>
<p>A couple more thoughts:
- I haven’t noticed as many big scholarships (i.e. $20 000+) for music ed majors. I’ve noticed more of these for performance/composition students. Possibly the music ed majors realize that their meagre future salaries will not allow repayment of large loans, so the music ed majors tend to go to schools with low tuitions (and schools with tuition of $5000 to $7000 per year do not usually offer any scholarships of $20 000+ per year). Careers in music ed just are not competitive in the same way that performance careers are, so music ed students and their families do not feel the same need to go to the best possible school in the country that will accept them. I do not intend any criticism of music ed majors: if criticism is merited by any group, then it would tend to be some of the performance kids that have virtually no hope of any career in their major and yet spend vast sums of money for an education that is only marginally better than what they could have had for a fraction of the price.
- Full rides for music (of any type) are relatively rare. Most schools just simply do not give full ride scholarships for musicians (by full-ride, I mean board, room, and tuition). Wealthy schools that give the most full rides (like the Ivies) tend not to have performance or music ed majors at all (or if they do, often they are not anything to write home about). Music full rides do exist but you will have to do some research; I have seen schools that officially offer full tuition and that will quietly bump up the offer to include room and board for an exceptional student that makes a quiet request.</p>
<p>Amounts are all over the place. My sons scholarship offers ranged from $1,200 to $14,000 (he’s a music ed major and was also accepted into the performance certificate program). The only trend that I noticed was that each offer become lower, in order of his audition date, despite the fact that he felt that he did better at each audition than the one before.</p>
<p>At one of the schools, his net cost (room/board/tuition) would have been negative $600/semester (meaning that he woudl have got some money back for books or whatever), but that was also at his last choice school, and was a combo of 4 school-sponsored music scholarships and ensemble stipends plus an academic scholarship from the state and a 3rd party scholarship. He elected to go to a college with a better music program even thought he net bottom line at the school that he enroled at is about $2,500/semester. I can deal with $2,500 a semester.</p>
<p>At the school he was offered the largest scholarship, the net annual cost was still going to be $28k ($50k sticker price), we simply couldn’t afford it and the college was probably not the best for his major. It has an outstanding reputation for academics, I really don’t know why they even accepted him academically, but the music program just isn’t quite as strong for his major and instrument as the school he enrolled in.
Net price is not the only consideration.</p>
<p>I agree that most music ed students are likely to attend state suported colleges, so that probably explains the lack of huge scholarships.</p>
<p>Thank you all for the very useful information</p>
<p>Also worth noting that a “full” tuition scholarship when entering may not actually cover tuition increases as the student progresses through the program. If you receive a scholarship where the numbers equal tuition, it’s probably worth contacting the school and having the language changed from a numeric value to “full tuition.” (Wish I’d thought of this a year ago…)</p>
<p>I will add a bit from the information I have gleaned from others now in music programs and such, and from what admissions people have said</p>
<p>-full ride scholarships are rare and usually they are based in financial need and from what I can tell, where kids come from unique backgrounds. In other words, a kid from a well off family unless they are some sort of musical genius is not very likely to get a full ride and the amount of aid they do get could be very little. A boy my son made friends with got a full ride to Peabody, he was really talented but came from a not well off family from a South American country (could have been venezuala, I don’t recall).</p>
<p>-From the limited evidence I have seen, a really talented student would probably stand a better chance of a full ride or at least a major scholarship applying to a less prestigious school looking to recruit top level players to bring their level up then at a top notch program bursting with talent. </p>
<p>Obviously, this is not hard and fast rules, but so far I haven’t seen much to make me think getting a full ride scholarship is all that likely, and if it exists it generally is going to be from a talented student from a challenged background, financially or whatever.</p>
<p>SUNY Potsdam gives 5 full ride scholarships (tuition, room and board plus $500 towards books) each year and over the last few years one is awarded to a Crane School of Music student. This scholarship is first based on academics and test scores, then leadership and ecs. The minimum academic criteria is 1300 CR & Math or 29 ACT plus minimum 92 GPA. If you qualify but don’t get the free ride, they are quite generous and offer up to free tuition but not room and board. Of course, the Crane School of Music also has talent scholarship money available, too. As the oldest music education school in the country they have a good endowment for a state school.</p>
<p>At my D’s school, the full rides are not given unless you also meet other criteria: first you have to be good enough to be the highest scholarship level, and then, of those, they look at your overall EFC and ultimate potential and interview/chose from that smaller pool. There are req’ts for scholarship students … the money isn’t just handed out without expecting something back. In my daughter’s case, her recent scholarship duty was to fill in for a class that needed a vocalist. Fortunately for her, the musicians are fantastic and she basically gets to take another class without having to pay for it. Other scholarship duties may vary at different school. My D’s friend at another school was required to sing in a chorus, but for her, that was not a good thing as she wanted to focus on other kinds of music. I believe there is also a correlation between great grades and high scholarships for music majors … for students of equal amazing musical talent, the one with higher grades may end up w/ a scholarship and the other person, zero. My daughter is amazed when she meets a musician who is so talented, yet didn’t receive a scholarship of any sort.</p>
<p>In stand-alone music schools/conservatories, if two auditioners display equal talent, then their merit-based awards are likely to be very similar even if one has a much better academic record (assuming that the student whose academics are weaker still has enough academic strength to gain admission).</p>
<p>In music schools that are part of a larger university, academics are much more likely to play a part in the size of the overall scholarship sum. At many such schools, excellent music students with strong academics can earn both a large music scholarship (often $10 000 to $20 000) and a large academic scholarship (similar range of values). </p>
<p>Every school is different though. Some wealthy schools give relatively little in merit-based aid (on the assumption that they are so selective that everyone deserves it), but instead give most of their money away in the form of need-based awards. At some universities, each school or college has its own merit-based entrance awards and therefore music students are only eligible for those from their school.</p>
<p>What violindad said gybes with what I have seen, in stand alone conservatories academics,test scores ande ecs don’t mean a lot, what they do is based upon musical ability pretty much exclusively (plus many music students in the top stand alone conservatories also tend to be academic achievers anyway, so there won’t be much to differentiate them. The rep on the top stand alone music schools and conservatories like Juilliard, NEC etc is that they attract such top level students that they don’t give a lot in merit, that most of it is based on need, and from the bits gleaned from hearing admissions people talk from these places, that sounds like it is mostly true. I was in one such presentation and some parents were almost outraged when the admissions person was asked about how much credit and credence their program and others gave to EC’s, APs, SAT scorees and GPA’s, and they basically said “pretty much nothing”.</p>
<p>With music schools contained within universities it seems like academics do matter, both in getting in and in terms of merit pay and scholarships, but it also varies from school to school. Some of the state music programs reputedly tend to take academics a lot stronger in terms of how they dole out scholarships and such to music schools, for example, same for some private university music programs, others besides having the stats to get into the university academically, base it on the musical ability, it all depends.</p>
<p>One of the things that should come out of these threads, almost anything you read on these boards, is that there are no magic rules about anything, that you have to assume that every school is different and even they change from season to season. In this thread posters were careful to say this is at X school, but often you will hear people say what happened to their S or D and say things like “Academics weight heavily” or “Talented students always get merit awards” , when it could apply only to that school or maybe their kids’ case. </p>
<p>One of the things I have found is that the admissions people tend to be pretty nice about answering questions, and once you have potential schools lined up,shoot them questions about how they do aid, they are the ones who will know.</p>
<p>It gets confusing when people use the term “scholarship” for need-based financial aid, rather than merit aid. Any time you start talking about EFC’s, a FAFSA term, you are referring to the financial need aid category. </p>
<p>A “full ride” (tuition, room and board) can often be cobbled together with a combination of merit and financial aid, provided there is school-determined financial need. </p>
<p>But for clarity’s sake and particularly for parents new at this, I think it’s important to distinguish what one is talking about.</p>
<p>Excellent points to violindad and musicprt regarding full conservatories and scholarships. And jazz/shreddermom is also onto something. When I talk about scholarships, I mean merit aid that is based on talent. The full ride I mentioned at my daughter’s school (Berklee) is called a Presidential scholarship, and is given to about 5 students a year based on extremely high talent, but in fact is only given to students that also have a strong need. One could say it is financial aid, but these students are so talented that anyone that works with them or hears them believes they deserve this type of honor and recognition (i.e. Esperanza Spaulding was a Presidential scholar at Berklee.) </p>
<p>To the original poster, don’t send your student to music school hoping for a huge scholarship … make sure you would send him and he would go even if there is no merit or scholarship aid to be had.</p>
<p>At the end of the day it is the cost of the school and the quality of the education that counts. Not the amount of the scholarship. If your state school(s) have a good music ed program(s) then that will likely be the best “bang for your buck” when all the scholarship offers are taken into account.</p>
<p>Be careful about tuition waivers…make sure you understand what that means. In Mass, if you are instate, it is fairly easy to qualify for a tuition waiver, but the tuition is only $1,700 then there are fees that amount to much more (I think around $8000 but I do not remember specifically). So the Mass tuition waiver is certainly very nice, it is probably not what you would anticipate as a tuition waiver. I have no idea how it works for other states.</p>
<p>Scholarship amounts (in music ed and other music degrees) vary depending upon many things including: school, talent, degree, instrument, financial need, academic achievement and so much more - I am sure. </p>
<p>One thing I have learned through this process is that all you cannot count on anything until those (acceptance) letters start coming in, and even then things can still change. </p>
<p>My D has several friends who are music ed majors and many different schools - in state and out of state. Scholarship amounts vary from a couple thousand a year to up to 20,000 a year. (We know a fair number of students who did not receive scholarship awards either - our high school is very large and has an excellent music program so we have a lot of graduates going into music ed.) The very talented student who go the 20K scholarship is going to a school that costs about twice what the in state tuition would cost. So at the end of the day, that school is not a bargain - but of course could still be an excellent school. </p>
<p>We chose the instate school for my daughter for many reasons, including cost/scholarship money. We know she will be very happy and very successful there.</p>