Oberlin and Indiana both have music conservatories that are separate from their colleges. Their conservatories compete with Juilliard and Curtis, not Yale. The Oberlin conservatory is small enough that some excellent musicians in the college get lots of opportunities to play with the conservatory students, but you can’t get a performance degree from the liberal arts side of Oberlin.
Yale and Princeton, and Harvard and Stanford, are all awesome places full of talented students, and all of them provide outlets for their talents. It’s hard for me to believe that there’s anywhere academically comparable with more student music than Yale. It’s just everywhere, and massive numbers of students participate, according to their talent, interest, and available time.
Years ago, I went to graduate school at Stanford, and there was nothing there at the time remotely like the music culture at Yale, although of course there were any number of talented musicians. (My best friend there who was an undergraduate actually became a professional musician and composer.) I think there’s more music now, but the kind of deep culture Yale has doesn’t grow up overnight, or even overdecade.
Harvard has a long tradition of having superstar musicians as students – going back, at least, to Leonard Bernstein and Yo-Yo Ma. Not to mention Rivers Cuomo and Tom Morello. At Marlboro last summer (it’s a famous program that has young professional musicians playing chamber music with well-known faculty), we saw two or three current Harvard undergraduates perform, and a few years ago we saw Stefan Jackiw as a soloist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra not long after his Harvard graduation. One of my Yale classmates, Sharon Isbin, has had a pretty sensational career as a classical guitarist, but Yale has had fewer people like that than Harvard, I think.