Author: clarinetist04
Date: 2010-11-05 02:11
This has been an extremely interesting thread to read.
It's interesting that many musicians can perform at a professional level out of high school. When's the last time you heard about a professional soloist (clarinetist) who we knew was good after they got their DMA or MA or BA? Hardly...most are identified at a young age and are brought into DMA programs or college programs at a very young age to study with a particular performer. Free of charge of course.
But this, naturally, isn't the norm. As a scientist and musician I empathize with many of the folks here. Back to the original topic at hand, it is likely that most of those Ph.D.'s that are working as janitors or fast-food clerks probably are doctors of a field in the liberal arts. I only know of a handful of Ph.D.'s who are in a science field (analytical or engineering sciences) who is now unemployed (not willingly). Not to say it doesn't happen, but it's very rare. But back to my original point, these are learned fields, not fields that you can just waltz out of high school and do well. Rarely will you find a high school senior who knows how to design a refinery or architect a building or design a fire resistant fabric. But often can you find the clarinetist who can play the dickens out of Daphne et Chloe or Weber 2 or Mozart.
The cost of education is indeed ridiculous. But it's not as crazy as you might think. Almost 70% of students who go to a four-year college pay less than $8,000/year for their tuition. Here's another comparison (from the data I could find readily): The average income rose 6.4% from 1993 to 2000 (from the US Census Bureau). The average cost that a student pays out of pocket (tuition/boarding after grants and scholarships) for the same time period has risen 3.8% for private schools and 4.2% for public schools (the most expensive institutions went up about 6.7%) (data from the National Center for Education Statistics).
But the reality is simple supply and demand economics. The demand for universities to issue diplomas is through the roof (i.e. a lot of students apply). No, we don't place enough emphasis on trades but nor is there the right distribution of majors graduating college. There are some majors where every single person will graduate with a job and job openings will remain (systems engineering, materials science, computer science, e.g.). Other majors might see 10% (Trombone Performance, Creative Writing, Turf Management -- yes, T.M. is a real major). But there are a lot of companies out there that would take a degree in philosophy to fill a position - the problem is that in our big public universities that have 500 graduates in each program, the time is not paid to the students to educate them on the opportunities out there that they might not know about. For example, so few English or Psychology majors realize that there is a huge demand for anyone with an analytical background in the consulting world (which, by the way, is booming right now). Of the ~50 people in my Chemical Engineering class, almost a third went into the financial or consulting arena. A quarter went to grad school and the remaining have jobs related to engineering.
At Bob's comment about school's giving "substandard Ph.D." candidates MS degrees, I would only hope that universities would be able to select the most qualified Ph.D. candidates to accept into their programs. Why would the university accept a student they thought may even have a chance at failing? In the sciences, like someone already said, very few people (and nobody at the good universities) pay any tuition in a Ph.D. program. Just to give you an idea of what the financials are like in engineering, the university I was accepted into (I didn't end up doing grad school at that point in my life) when I applied to a Ph.D. program, gave me a full tuition waiver, no student fees, a free parking space, and about $20,000 to live on.
In the end none of this really matters. The good programs churn out good graduates most of the time. Mediocre universities churn out mediocre graduates most of the time and likewise for not-so-good colleges. Music is on an island with drama and the rest of the performing arts. As long as supply of students wishing to study music remains high, don't expect to get any tuition breaks. There's no incentive for universities to decrease tuition and I see graduate music degrees as an escape from the reality that they'll likely never have a job in the industry they've niched themselves into.
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