This article is taken from the February 2023 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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There has never been a worse time to go to music college. Fees are astronomical, expenses sky-high. In London, you will spend £9,000 a year on tuition and twice as much on living costs.Any major US college will set you back $80-100,000 a year, for three years. Still thinking about it?

Let’s assume your gifted child has done well enough to win a scholarship. Even better, a full upkeep grant of the type that the Curtis Institute (Philadelphia) and Colburn School (Los Angeles) offer. No costs, then, to the parents. But what kind of care will your child receive?

Why, in a shrinking world for classical employment, would anyone bother with music college?

One recent Christmas, Juilliard threw all foreign students out of its dorms in order to save on heating. Curtis has a long history of student rape, now independently investigated. At the University of North Carolina, 56 arts students have lodged claims of sexual assault. A violin professor, Steven Shipps, was jailed in Michigan. Also in Michigan, the composer Bright Sheng was suspended from teaching after screening a classic film of Othello in which Laurence Olivier appeared in blackface.

Bullying and victimization are rife on campus. Yo Yo Ma told a college audience, “you have witnessed power and abuse”. Teachers are no longer allowed to say what they mean or show what they need to. It is unacceptable to lay hands on a student’s arm or neck to improve posture and technique. An electronic eye blinks unceasingly in the ceiling. Studio doors are kept open. Teachers get fired for a wrong word in an email. Fear and loathing stalk the hallowed halls.

And what does a student get out of it? The best most can aspire to is an orchestral audition where they compete against 40 others for a job in the American Midwest worth thirty grand a year. Meanwhile, classmates who skipped college and put in extra practice at home are two streets ahead on the solo circuit or supervising soundtracks in Hollywood. Why, in a shrinking world for classical employment, would anyone bother with music college?

The potential payback is twofold. First is the prestige of having studied with a famous person. A violinist who has lessons with Anne-Sophie Mutter, a composer with John Adams, carries extra kudos on the billboards. London’s Royal Academy of Music posts both star names in its prospectus, though their hours are necessarily short.

The other benefit of music college is meeting people who will be playing partners for the rest of your life. Most string quartets are formed on campus. Many love matches are made.

As an industry, music education has failed to march with the times. The syllabus and teaching style has barely changed in my lifetime

Colleges have golden periods, where one outstanding teacher creates disciplinary excellence. Hans Swarowsky was a conducting magnet in 1950s Vienna, with Abbado, Mehta and Sinopoli among his students. Ilya Musin was the maestro maker of St Petersburg, while Jorma Panula unleashed two packs of Finnish talent from the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki.

The violin teacher Zakhar Bron and the pianist Arie Vardi held sway in Cologne and Hanover. But a lone teacher’s aura soon wears off the honours board and such random influences are impossible to replace. No music college now is guaranteed to turn raw seeds into sunflowers.

As an industry, music education has failed to march with the times. The syllabus and teaching style has barely changed in my lifetime. Nor has the ultimate aspiration — producing musicians for a society that values them less each passing year and expects to receive concerts for free online.

When I visit music colleges, I see few that provide more than an elementary awareness of how a graduate might make a living in music — or outside of it. A major shortcoming of music colleges has been their inability to encourage less-talented students to seek alternative careers while maintaining their love of music. Many leave the system feeling like failures.

Amid shrinking local demand, the leading colleges now send their principals to China twice a year to recruit a student population with Beijing government subsidy. Some, like Juilliard, have even set up a branch in Shanghai where students are given technical tuition without exposure to capitalist lifestyles. These overtures apart, no music academy has made a significant step towards equipping its graduates for the twenty-first-century real world. With one exception.

They can learn how to run a talent agency, a record studio, a streaming hub or a podcast

Over the past couple of years, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music has redefined its central purpose. In October 2020, SFCM president David Stull bought out a large, struggling New York artists agency, Opus3. Seven months later, he acquired the Dutch record label Pentatone. In two strokes, Stull flipped the conservatory from a kindergarten to a grown-up player in the music business.

San Francisco music students now have options. They can learn how to run a talent agency, a record studio, a streaming hub or a podcast. Eun Sun Kim, music director of San Francisco Opera, has signed for Stull’s record label. In December 2022 he founded a fellowship for “pre-professional Black” string players to study at SFCM while performing at full union rates with the San Francisco Ballet orchestra.

This breaks down so many social barriers I haven’t the space left to enumerate them. But the bottom line is that SFCM students can play their way through college, no longer barred by cost or prejudice, finding their feet in the real world two years before they line up for graduation. In the dying days of 2022, Stull acquired the London artists’ agency, Askonas Holt, making SFCM a major player in the global classical music business. Stull likes to say: “Think about the conservatory as an R&D place.” He has shifted the future of music decisively to the West Coast. In a couple of years, we should see results.