I guess this situation doesn’t surprise me: for those of us who attended university music programs, how many of our classmates actually went on to a professional life in music? If your school is like mine, less than 10%. Was there ever a correspondence between real-world job prospects and university enrollment? There is a divide between music education and performance. Their goals are different, and they step on each others’ toes a lot.

It seems to me that higher education is a business like any other, though it tries not to present itself as such. To those in the education business, then, it makes sense to do whatever it takes to keep the ship afloat: raise enrollment (and class size), offer “real world” opportunities to perform in order to attract students, etc. The fact that in so doing they undermine what professionals are trying to do is an unfortunate side effect.

There are two solutions to this problem as I see it:

1) Universities jettison their single-mindedness, operate not only in their own interest but in the interest of music as a whole, thereby staying off our turf.

2) Professional musicians make some noise about the problem, emphasizing the superior quality of a professional job to that of a university (and if that’s not the case, what do we have going for us at all?).

In some ways, this issue resembles the classic “amateur musician” issue, where hobby musicians take jobs for less money than professionals would, pushing the price of our labor down etc. As long as there is a noticeable difference in quality between the amateur and professional, though, some people will always be willing to pay for the difference…hopefully.