Colleges

If a college degree is on your mind, prepare yourself to spend a batch of time and money at it! Fortunately, Bachelor's degrees are fairly useful. They prove you have enough grit to successfully persevere at a complex array of tasks called courses (many of which seem loony and only distantly related to your goals) over a four-year period, getting them all done in spite of mind-numbing rules, bizarre regulations and endless other impediments, like pissant professors, crummy equipment, complaining girl/boyfriends, and abject poverty. Your reward? The Bachelor's degree is reasonably widely accepted as a credential of capability. It implies that you actually know some stuff and can be trusted to get other useful stuff done with reasonably acceptable quality. You can get a job with a Bachelor's degree, and the skills you acquired through the above four-year torture-test will help you successfully cope with, dare I say it, "the real world!"

Interestingly, your degree major doesn't matter too much in the final analysis. However, we do learn best while studying what we're really interested in, and professionally it does make sense that we should major in something related to our interests. This is why degree programs in recording engineering or audio make sense for those of us reading Recording magazine. However, while you are wading through a degree program, you should also make absolutely sure you pick up some math, computer skills, acoustics, and general business. You would also be wise to grab at least one foreign language. You'll never get a better chance!

Graduate degrees in audio are of limited usefulness right now, unless you decide you wish to teach (for which you are definitely gonna need advanced degrees) and/or you get really curious about the subject. In such cases, graduate study is essential.

As far as what kind of colleges are best, there are two opposing criteria: educational quality vs. professional visibility.

The first has to do with the general quality of the education you get. As I mentioned above, my experience is that liberal arts education is the best way to go, so I think you might be smart to pick the best liberal arts college you can find that has a halfway decent audio program. State schools can be bargains here because of their low tuitions. However, because such schools spend much of their lives as political footballs, you run the risk of arriving on campus just after they've been punted once again by their friendly state legislature. Said punt can really diminish the quality of your education. Private and independent schools, on the other hand, tend to be a little more stable but lots more expensive, and the toney ones don't offer audio (hey, the really toney ones don't like to offer anything that might lead directly to a job!). With all that said, you can find private and public colleges and universities that offer solid training in recording while also giving you a strong general education (send me a SASE, if you want, for a list of half-a-dozen or so colleges that I think are pretty decent ). My thinking is: if you're gonna spend four years at it, you might as well really load up on stuff!

The opposing criterion I mentioned above has to do with your professional life after college. This is where "professional" schools offer an edge. As I mentioned, Juilliard's training wasn't so hot outside of it's specialties: ear training, music performance and lessons, and I felt the same was true at Berklee. Actually, I suspect this is endemic to all stand-alone music conservatories and probably most professional and technical schools as well (MIT may be an exception). However, while the "learning-how-to-learn" part of the training in such schools may be deficient, the professional contacts you make in such schools often make up for it, turning out to be immensely valuable, as does the cachet of having gone to such places. There is a network, and if you can lay claim to membership in it, it can sure help when you are out there trying to make your way through the professional jungle. For me, even though it seems cynical, the value of having been educated in the same classes with numerous people who have ended up being "big names" may be as important professionally as the quality of the education I got. (My Juilliard degree has opened doors well beyond what its actual educational quality deserves!) The deciding point about this has to do with your goals. Do you want to be a star? a big name? work in major studios? on major projects? Then you might be well advised to join "the club," and the initiation fee is usually tuition at a school with a strong professional reputation. If you are more interested in other aspects of the field, where connections and contacts aren't as important, then you may be able to ignore that consideration with little loss, and concentrate instead on educational quality in place of star visibility.

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