The Jazz Degree Illusion

What music schools charge, what students get, and the math nobody wants to run

Is a jazz degree worth it?

This is one of those questions people prefer you not ask—especially if you love the music, teach as a part of the university system, or you’re currently enrolled in a program. But the fact that it makes people uncomfortable is exactly why it needs to be asked.

By my third year at Berklee, I already knew something no catalog description could admit: the most important work I was doing had very little to do with the institution. My real progress came from practicing, listening, playing with fellow students, and self-interrogation—the things jazz has always demanded, long before syllabi and juries tried to formalize them.

Still, I stayed. I finished the degree. Not because I felt I needed it, but because I had already bought into the idea that walking away would somehow mean failure. At the time, it felt responsible. Grown-up and sensible. And besides, my mother would have gone full on postal on me.

Then graduation came, and with it the harshest lesson of all.

I wasn’t artistically lost—I was economically naked. I had a diploma and no real understanding of how that diploma translated into a livelihood. I had been trained to play, but not to survive. That disconnect wasn’t accidental. It was structural.

Which raises the question nobody wants to put on the brochure: what exactly are students buying when they pay for a jazz performance degree today?

Let’s move aside the romance for a second and talk numbers.

A jazz studies major often pays the same tuition as a nursing major, a pharmacy major, or a pre-med student. Same sticker price. Radically different outcomes. The nurse graduates into a profession. There’s licensure, demand, a paycheck waiting not far down the road. Within a year—often less—that debt starts shrinking.

The jazz graduate, on the other hand, enters a lottery masquerading as a career path. Employment is undefined. Income is speculative. Success—when it happens—tends to arrive late, unevenly, and without benefits. Making six figures before 30 as a jazz musician requires celebrity, independent wealth, or a career that isn’t really jazz at all.

This doesn’t mean jazz lacks value. It means the economic logic of the degree is broken.

Passion does not service loans. Sallie Mae never waves the white flag. Artistry does not pause compound interest. And your ability to swing and nail the changes does not renegotiate repayment schedules.

Debt is not theoretical. It limits one’s artistic risks. It disciplines imagination. It quietly determines who can afford to “stay in the game” long enough to develop a voice. When institutions tell students to “follow their passion” without explaining the bill that follows, they’re not being noble—they’re being evasive.

This is the part that rarely gets discussed in jazz education: debt doesn’t just affect your finances—it affects your music. It shapes how much time you can afford to fail, to explore, to sound bad on the way to sounding like yourself. It determines who gets to stay long enough to grow into a voice, and who gets forced out before that voice has a chance to settle.

When I first moved to New York, survival came way before artistic vision. Every day was about rent, food, transit—figuring out how to stay afloat long enough to see another month. Practice didn’t disappear, but it became something you negotiated with exhaustion and anxiety. My time, space, and focus—three things musicians need most—were suddenly scarce.

At one point, I didn’t even have a place to practice. I had a friend going to Manhattan School of Music, and I used to bribe the security guard with a cup of coffee and a newspaper just to get into the building. They’d let me sneak upstairs and practice in an empty room for a while. That became my workaround—temporary, fragile, and dependent on someone else’s goodwill.

I used to tell people, half-joking and half-defensive, you should’ve heard me when I was still at Berklee. What I meant was simple: I felt like my playing had slipped. Maybe some of that was in my head—but anyone who’s lived this knows that psychological erosion can be just as damaging as physical decline. When you’re constantly worried about money, your imagination doesn’t roam freely. It tightens and plays defense.

Here’s another truth that gets fogged in the university’s business model.

A professor teaching business, law, or medicine commands a higher salary than someone teaching jazz, dance, or visual art. Why? Because the former can earn more in the private sector. Let’s not even throw athletic coaches into the conversation. The university has to pay them competitively to get them in the classroom. That market logic is fully acknowledged, openly discussed, and built into faculty pay structures.

So the question becomes unavoidable: why does that same logic disappear when tuition bills are sent out?

If we accept that market value matters when compensating professors, why pretend it doesn’t matter when pricing degrees? Why should students pursuing radically different economic outcomes be charged as if those outcomes were the same?

That silence isn’t accidental. It’s convenient.

Now let me be clear before anyone sharpens their knives: this is not an argument against education. It’s an argument against pretending that all degrees are doing the same kind of work.

Some music degrees at least tell the truth about what they are. Music education does exactly what it promises: certification, placement, entry into a system. You may debate the system, but you can’t accuse it of dishonesty. The path is visible.

The same goes for recording engineering and well-designed music technology programs. At their best, they teach concrete, transferable skills. They acknowledge the market instead of pretending it’s beneath consideration. They prepare students to function inside real workflows, not imaginary golden ages.

And that’s why I give credit where it’s due.

At the Roc Nation School of Music, Sports & Entertainment, my current employer, the program isn’t built around nostalgia. Students aren’t being groomed for gigs that disappeared before they were born. Nobody is training them to wait by the phone for the Basie band to call. The curriculum reflects the world they will actually enter—hip-hop, pop, production, sports management, branding, recording engineering. Internships with Roc Nation the company, aren’t decorative; they’re structural. Some of them lead directly to jobs.

That matters. That’s an ecosystem, not a fantasy.

Contrast that with the traditional jazz studies model, which still behaves as if the industry that once supported it is merely resting between tours. That world has diminished. The labels that once believed in artist development are gone. The club circuits handing out six-night engagements are gone. The middle class of working jazz musicians has significantly declined—those musicians who lived between stardom and obscurity, who weren’t household names but earned a dependable living through steady union gigs, touring, and studio work.

What replaced it is DIY culture, teaching hybrids, social media content creation, and long, incremental climbs that don’t resemble anything most programs are designed to address. Yet the tuition remains unchanged, as if the outcomes hadn’t shifted beneath our feet.

I’m not saying jazz shouldn’t be studied and paid for. Because many programs are churning out amazing players. I’m saying it shouldn’t be sold under false pretenses.

If we believe in the music—and I do—we owe students honesty, not mythology. We owe them clarity about risk, cost, probability, and alternatives. Loving the music is real. The debt is real too. Only one of those follows you into bankruptcy court.

This isn’t a manifesto. It’s not some old guy trying to crap on a young upstarts dream. It’s a coat pull. And it’s long overdue.

If interested, my new book of jazz noir stories is now available on Amazon in paperback. CLICK HERE

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