Rewriting the Score: Recruiting Students with Musical Abilities

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Can you think of a more obvious way in which we favor students with access to formal training and financial resources?

In the rapidly evolving higher education landscape, colleges and universities still use outdated recruitment strategies to identify and attract student musicians. The old playbook is centered around in-person auditions, music theory assessments, and performance résumés…

This is about ACCESS.

Student athletes are recruited both culturally and organically through digital means. Ask any high school guidance counselor about MaxPreps or NCSA, and you’ll find that the barrier to entry for an athletics scholarship are practically none! Yes, skills are required, but not as much as you would think.

Because of the various access barriers we’ve erected in the music field many talented individuals are overlooked. It’s time to modernize collegiate recruitment practices to create a more accessible path towards musical participation and education at the post-secondary level and relieve the stranglehold we’ve placed on our talent pool.

Music colleges are tired of fighting over the same 23,000 students every year. It’s time to widen the pool of musical talent and abilities by doing away with the chokepoints in our pipeline.

Now…which should we tackle first?

Find out next week how we can use the athletics recruiting and scouting models to our advantage…