Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Gross injustices


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Posted by Rick Denney on November 28, 2001 at 13:02:04:

In Reply to: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Gross injustices posted by Jay Bertolet on November 28, 2001 at 11:52:12:

Jay asks, "Who are you betting is going to win the first audition that comes up? Both have essentially identical resumes. They also both have roughly the same amount of experience; one. So what makes the difference? I'll bet on the focused student any time."

There is a third choice, which refutes the notion that college is particularly helpful here. And that is the gifted musician who studies privately with a great teacher for four years and works gigs in his spare time to pay for it. By the end of that four years, he'll be better prepared than the college student to win the audition, and he'll have four years of real-world experience at being a pro. I'll put my money on him. In fact, he may not go to the audition in the first place, because he may not need it.

Of course, he'll have to be gifted to get that sort of teacher interested in him, but I'd bet that this method would train as many great tuba players as there are jobs for them to do.

Does that mean that music majors who can't get the jobs wasted their college? Of course not, and this is the real point of what Ken and I are saying. What you learn in college serves all pursuits. If you think fast food is the only choice for most musicians with a degree, then you are talking about bad students at colleges that handed them a degree on a platter. They should have learned the skills of organized learning in pursuit of their degree, and those skills are useful in all professions. When I lived in Austin, I knew many musicians who were computer programmers on staff at the University of Texas, making more money than just about any performer. The only college requirement for that job was a degree in whatever.

In this way, music (and many other jobs) can't be compared to engineering, because there is no state licensing requirement for musicians, while there is for engineers. I can't get licensed without that accredited degree, and the university can't get accredited without an oft-reviewed broad base of math and science courses. But in my work as an engineer, I have benefitted much more from the literature and history courses, which helped me to become articulate, than I did in the business courses of my graduate program, which is all out-dated now. Being articulate is a rare and valuable trait for an engineer, believe me.

Jay mentions that had he to do it over again, he'd focus more on those elective and support classes, including music history and theory. But that is precisely my point--the need for those subjects is only apparent from this distance of time, it never seems important to college students while they are in college.

Finally, I'd like to say that unlike primary and secondary schools, colleges offer a range of opportunity and experience. For those who want job training, there are thousands of community colleges and trade schools that do an excellent job. At the other end of the scale, there are colleges like Harvard, Rice, and so on (to name examples of a liberal arts and a more technical school) that deliberately diversify the educational spectrum for their students. These are the universities that get the most respect as universities. Why is that? It's because their graduates can do...anything.

(As an aside, when I entered the architecture school at Texas A&M, their graduates were more likely to get work on graduation than were the architecture graduates of Rice. But look at the fellows doing the real design, whose names are on the letterhead of the big firms. Those are the fellows who went to places like Rice. It wasn't because of social advantage, either. Rice is an endowed school with--at that time--no tuition, where gifted students went who could not afford the Ivy League. The advantage of job orientation is short-lived.)

Rick "who learned most of what he knows after college" Denney



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