<p>Last year my son received an unsolicited 65 page, spiral bound, glossy book from Johns Hopkins touting their music engineering program. To be admitted one had to be admitted to BOTH the Peabody Institute and the Hopkins school of engineering. The tuition was laughably astronomical. The enclosed letter explained that his name had been gathered as one of very few students nationally with extremely high math SAT scores AND a possible interest in music as a major (he checked that box when he took the SAT).</p>
<p>He asked around and found out that the program struggles to find 15 students each year, that most kids who are interested in pursuing music engineering have been playing around with sound boards and easy to use computer programs for years (he hadn’t ever expressed even an interest in that side of music), and that the return on the investment would be highly questionable.</p>
<p>The point is that the book, while impressively slick, was purely a marketing tool for a hard to fill program.</p>