Lynn Conservatory

August 1, 2023, 7:06 AM · Elmar Oliveira teaches there, fantastic player and teacher.

August 1, 2023, 7:35 AM · After going through the application process last year, not one higher level US violinist I know ended up applying. The overall level of the other instrumental programs is definitely not that high, despite Elmar Oliveira and the free tuition. And it is in Florida, which a whole lot of students are avoiding right now.

My guess is it may end up getting a lot of foreign students, somewhat similar to Roosevelt University in Chicago. This program is similar -- superstar violin teacher with generous merit aid situated in an otherwise only so-so university. However, it draws a lot of very talented foreign students who are excluded from a lot of the top conservatories because they are ineligible for financial aid.

August 1, 2023, 7:10 PM · That sounds very similar to the Schwob music school at Columbus State in Georgia.

August 2, 2023, 5:52 PM · Is there any way to assess how the graduates from a particular conservatory fared? [Not just the occasional shining star.]

August 2, 2023, 9:15 PM · @Elise, my guess is that there is no way to assess those kinds of outcomes from the outside. I'm willing to bet that the institution itself struggles to do that.

August 2, 2023, 9:56 PM · Elise, the schools actually have this data and if you ask them they will usually provide it. They know exactly how many graduated, how many ended up in music, how many got/kept jobs, and what the average earnings are. I seem to remember there is an online dataset of a lot of this info that includes a number of the conservatories as well but I cannot recall the name of the site.

August 3, 2023, 11:30 AM · Thanks Susan. I thought it must be somewhere - and maybe that really should be your guide (unless you are the top student anyway perhaps).

August 3, 2023, 3:00 PM · Information such as Elise is suggesting students should look at is, in my opinion, of extremely limited usefulness. Auditions are not linear. And there are all kinds of factors that enter into the jobs people end up with. Some people conclude that their lives are happier outside of music – this does not mean that they weren’t qualified to win auditions. Some wonderful players end up at lower level schools for family or financial reasons, but are competitive on the audition circuit, perhaps with a boost from a summer festival or something like that. In fact, summer festivals can be an enormous variable.

There are certainly a few well-known pairings of schools and orchestras – Philadelphia Orchestra/Curtis; Cleveland Orchestra/Cleveland Institute of Music - but even there it is very far from a one to one correspondence.

You can find Indiana University alumni in pretty much every professional orchestra at every level, but lots of successful musicians never set foot on the Bloomington campus, and plenty of musicians went to Indiana, but are now doing something else with their lives.

August 3, 2023, 8:50 PM · Haven't you tried looking up their performances online???

August 3, 2023, 10:33 PM · I agree with Mary Ellen. Is a student to be considered a failure if they get a degree in chemistry and then a year later they're working in a restaurant? The individual might have any number of reasons for doing that. We really need to reject this idea that the purpose of an education is a salary. At the same time, if you're going to college hoping for a certain outcome, then what you want to know is whether the recently-minted alumni of a particular school feel their education helped them compete for jobs or graduate programs in the field of their degree. But that's not what outcomes surveys typically ask.

August 4, 2023, 1:29 AM · Paul asked, "Is a student to be considered a failure if they get a degree in chemistry and then a year later they're working in a restaurant?"

I think that depends on the reason. The institution can certainly be considered to have failed the student if the reason they're not employed in a field related to their major is because the institution has inadequate career services for helping new graduates get jobs, because the institution has not provided the student with knowledge to be employable (assuming that the student's major corresponds to a career field), etc.

(Yes, I recognize that students do attend universities simply for the sake of broadening their mind, exploring new interests etc. etc. etc. but to me, that's effectively a statement of privilege. Most students in the US attend college so they can earn a credential that will allow them to get past the gatekeepers of professional jobs that pay enough for them to gradually dig out of the massive hole of college debt they likely had to take on.)

August 4, 2023, 11:34 AM · Paul wrote: "We really need to reject this idea that the purpose of an education is a salary." Where did you pull that idea from? Certainly not from my reply. All I said is that it would be useful to see what graduates from that school did after they left. I did not say why.

Since Mary Ellen may not have understood either I'll expand a bit. This information is useful in any school because if you go to study football and nobody has ever been recruited for a major team I think you can conclude that you are rather unlikely to be the first [for whatever reason - maybe the good athletes go elsewhere, the teaching is poor, or the emphasis is on something different like sports history!

It seems almost trivial to conclude that the same is true for the violin. If your purpose is to be a symphony violinist and only one person in 20 years who graduated from that school became one its pretty safe to say that you are unlikely to - again for whatever reason (student ability, school emphasis, teaching quality etc etc).

August 4, 2023, 11:34 AM · Paul wrote: "We really need to reject this idea that the purpose of an education is a salary." Where did you pull that idea from? Certainly not from my reply. All I said is that it would be useful to see what graduates from that school did after they left. I did not say why.

Since Mary Ellen may not have understood either I'll expand a bit. This information is useful in any school because if you go to study football and nobody has ever been recruited for a major team I think you can conclude that you are rather unlikely to be the first [for whatever reason - maybe the good athletes go elsewhere, the teaching is poor, or the emphasis is on something different like sports history!

It seems almost trivial to conclude that the same is true for the violin. If your purpose is to be a symphony violinist and only one person in 20 years who graduated from that school became one its pretty safe to say that you are unlikely to - again for whatever reason (student ability, school emphasis, teaching quality etc etc).

August 4, 2023, 11:34 AM · Paul wrote: "We really need to reject this idea that the purpose of an education is a salary." Where did you pull that idea from? Certainly not from my reply. All I said is that it would be useful to see what graduates from that school did after they left. I did not say why.

Since Mary Ellen may not have understood either I'll expand a bit. This information is useful in any school because if you go to study football and nobody has ever been recruited for a major team I think you can conclude that you are rather unlikely to be the first [for whatever reason - maybe the good athletes go elsewhere, the teaching is poor, or the emphasis is on something different like sports history!

It seems almost trivial to conclude that the same is true for the violin. If your purpose is to be a symphony violinist and only one person in 20 years who graduated from that school became one its pretty safe to say that you are unlikely to - again for whatever reason (student ability, school emphasis, teaching quality etc etc).

Edited: August 4, 2023, 1:00 PM · @Elise, no, it wasn't from your response. I was just triggered. And I agree with your further explanation.

@Lydia, the problem is that when people collect and distribute "data" often the "reasons" aren't conveyed. And I also agree with your "statement of privilege" notion. I've said before that the operational definition of being upper middle class is the ability to go to college and major in whatever you want (or ditch most of your classes and graduate with a 2.2) because you know you'll never starve.

My concern is not really with the idea that the purpose of college is earning a professional credential. My concern is with the way "outcome data" is collected an interpreted.

Edited: August 5, 2023, 12:45 AM · I understood Elise’s post perfectly well and I stand by my response, although to be fair I do presuppose that people are aware of the general ranking of music schools. But beyond that widely known acceptance of elite/solid/lesser schools, I don’t think further information is all that helpful.

Auditions aren’t linear, and one doesn’t need to look very hard to find examples of really fine musicians who ended up (by choice) practicing law, practicing as an MD or RN, working in IT, or selling insurance.

Edited: August 5, 2023, 9:56 AM · A lot of people go to college not really knowing what they want to do, or even having a decent grasp on the range of their opportunity. I'm going to presuppose that this includes students entering conservatories. Trouble is that the money available for college may be limited, so transferring from, say, CIM's BM program to CWRU's BS in polymer science may require the student to bascially start over. So the student toughs out the BM and takes a few half-hearted auditions while looking for a job selling insurance. Ten years later the student is a mid-level insurance executive making $175000 a year and is in a far better position to donate back to CIM than other graduates who are employed "in the field" by virtue of their home Suzuki studio and their fees from the local freeway phil. Maybe this is why Lynn Conservatory can offer free tuition? Is it precisely because their graduates enjoyed their experience at Lynn but they're actually employed in other fields, practicing law or medicine, etc.? I think about this from my vantage as a chemistry professor. Should we be sending fewer of our graduate students to get PhDs and more of them to get JDs, MDs, MBAs, and the like? Would our relatively meager scholarship coffers (certainly compared to our counterparts in finance, marketing, and landscape architecture) be deeper if we had taken that strategy 20 years ago?