Volume 66, No. 1

“Achievement comes to denote the sort of thing that a well-planned machine can do better than a human being can, and the main effect of education, the achieving of a life of rich significance, drops by the wayside.”
— John Dewey, Democracy and Education (1915)

“Musical innovation is full of danger to the State, for when the modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the State always change with them.”
— Plato, Republic, Book IV

Introduction

In an age when artificial intelligence can compose fugues, code software, and draft legal memos with unnerving precision, the idea that students should choose their college degrees based solely on career readiness is beginning to collapse under its own weight. Ironically, the most pragmatic degrees—once heralded as the golden ticket to the middle class—are now proving brittle in a labor market shaped by automation and algorithm (Roose, 2025). Computer science graduates, seemingly just yesterday the envy of liberal arts majors everywhere, now compete with machines that never sleep (Horowitch, 2025). Music has been historically sidelined to the fray in these utilitarian crusades, regarded as a passion project rather than a profession. Music programs, long and rightly wary of this narrative, responded defensively: career readiness (Bennett, 2016), more exclusivity in some spaces (Tanenbaum, 2016), while in others, inclusive pedagogies that welcome popular music and technology in service of neoliberal market tendencies (Benedict & O’Leary, 2019; Richerme, 2025). The sharp paradigmatic pivot of higher music education (hereafter HME) toward vocational specialization is now colliding with a new economic and political world order that renders it increasingly obsolete. As artificial intelligence decimates formerly stable career tracks, automating tasks in fields once considered safe bets, the demand for narrowly trained professionals is shrinking, not growing. Almost 40% of jobs will be impacted by artificial intelligence, many of which are at risk of partial or full automation—particularly those requiring technical skill but limited critical thinking or creativity (Walsh, 2025).

I argue that music—long excluded from the practical disciplines—has a chance to get ahead of the curve. The Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) in music degree, traditionally dismissed as a lesser fallback for students unable to enter more rigorous professional music programs, has the potential to emerge as a model for the kind of education our times require: concurrent breadth and depth, adaptability, and agonism. The original seven liberal arts, after all, were divided into the trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy). Several researchers have made the case for the value of music as positioned in the liberal arts (Kivy, 1991 takes a praxialist approach to its place in the humanities; Aquila, 2022 and Yi, 2022 examine parochial contexts). In sum, the scholarly position is that music is not a hobby, extra-curricular, or non-academic; it is epistemological—a way of perceiving and experiencing the world.

The humanistic lens offered by the liberal arts is now more vital than ever before. Political violence, eroding democratic norms, and growing mistrust in institutions have produced a “pernicious polarization” and a public in need of civic education that fosters empathy, dialogue, and critical engagement (McCoy & Press, 2022). A liberally grounded music degree has the potential to support precisely these democratic habits of mind. It cultivates listening—not just as technique, but as a political act (Silverman, 2015); it embraces interdisciplinary thought, encouraging students to draw connections between sound, society, and self; and it resists the idea that one’s education must align precisely with one’s first job (Perfas, 2024). Indeed, the goal of the liberal arts curriculum is to educate not just for a job, but for citizenship and for life.

Despite this, many in HME cling to the notion that the Bachelor of Music (B.M.) degree is the only valid path to a professional music career. Existing scholarship on music as a liberal art has primarily focused on “non-music majors” (Roth, 2016). The conventional wisdom insists that, to be a serious performer or public-school music educator, one ought to attend a conservatory or a university school of music with a singular focus on the musical craft. But the current wisdom begs to differ. With auditioned opportunities dwindling (Peyrebrune, 2025), funding for the arts contracting (Veltman, 2005), and the gig economy offering little in the way of stability or benefits (Gerstein, 2024; Friedman, 2014), young musicians increasingly graduate with highly specialized training and very few options. The majority of music graduates work outside the arts sector within five years of completing their degree (NEA, 2023). Many perhaps wish they had pursued a broader base of study—one that included writing, languages, philosophy, or public policy to a greater extent—opening numerous professional doors while deepening artistic insight.

In this context, the B.A. in music offers a favorable and honest path. It has the capacity to maintain rigorous performance standards while empowering students to double-major, study abroad, conduct interdisciplinary research, and prepare for graduate work in music or other fields of study. Importantly, I situate the B.A. in music as a liberally based major—possibly, but not necessarily at liberal arts colleges—as opposed to the more professionally constrained B.M. degree that is often defined by the National Association of Schools of Music (NASM) guidelines. B.A. in music degrees can be found in liberal arts college as well as regional or flagship public university schools and departments of music. Through the B.A., students wishing to professionalize in music have the capacity to do so, or to further specialize in graduate school via a funded Master of Music degree—just as aspiring lawyers can earn a J.D. after majoring in English, history, or political science. Others will leave with flexible, marketable skills and a worldview sharpened by artistic practice.

The goal of this paper is not to disparage the utility or merits of the B.M. degree or conservatory training. Indeed, musicians and scholars abound, myself included, who have honed our crafts while developing soft skills and democratic habits of mind in such educationally specialized contexts. Rather, given the context of our cultural, economic, and political milieu, I aim to consider the merits of an oft-neglected liberal arts framework for tertiary music education. As a music educator, band director, and researcher at a private university whose music department is housed within a school of liberal arts, my practice and positionality inform this work. At my institution, students have emerged as professional musicians, scholars and teachers through a liberally focused curriculum. The anecdotal myth of the B.A. in music as a consolation prize is due for retirement. In a time of epistemic crisis and technological disruption, it may well be the most honest, and, dare I say useful, degree HME can offer.

The Promise of Employability

Even as the realities of the music profession become more precarious, many schools of music—particularly those institutions purporting to educate the most elite undergraduate musicians—continue to market an alluring but increasingly untenable promise: that technical excellence, honed in cloistered spaces of tradition and prestige, will be enough to secure a sustainable career in music. The so-called “Juilliard Effect”—the illusion that a top conservatory degree guarantees artistic employment—was questioned widely when the New York Times published a follow-up study on conservatory alumni ten years after graduation (Wakin, 2004). Its findings were sobering. Many of those profiled were working outside of music, juggling gigs with unrelated jobs, or simply out of the field entirely. Wakin (2004) likened the conservatory student to a “compulsive gambler,” as the field remains “one big bet.” He continued, “but the drive to study music is so blinding, and doing anything else so inconceivable, that young players are oblivious to the risk.”

Two decades later, little has changed except that perhaps the stakes are even higher as college tuition continues to soar (Neitzel, 2025; Hanson, 2024), admissions rates to competitive music programs persist (Barone, 2024), and the job market for recent graduates teeters (Rugaber, 2025). This is not to stay that music academia as a whole is complicit. Scholars have taken due interest in exposing the realities of careers in music, such as widespread prospect uncertainty. Bennett and Bridgstock (2015) describe the challenges associated with modern careers in music, such as “enforced entrepreneurship, multiple roles, the need to build and run a small business, finding their niche, and the need to retain and refine their technical skills even when undertaking other work” (p. 274). Despite such perspectives illustrating the messiness of undertaking a music career, specialized tertiary music programs often fail to prepare students for the actual conditions of cultural labor: freelance instability, entrepreneurial demands, or the need to collaborate across disciplines and communities. Instead, schools often double down on performance perfectionism and competition—traits that may win an audition but do little to foster the adaptability and civic imagination required to build a sustainable life in the arts.

Career Readiness or Curricular Capture? Reassessing Reform in Higher Music Education

In response to rising tuition costs and intensifying pressure to demonstrate return on investment, music schools over the past quarter century have rebranded themselves not as sanctuaries of aesthetic inquiry or civic cultivation, but as laboratories of industry readiness. Curricular reform efforts—many of them sincere, some justifiably urgent—have pivoted toward entrepreneurship, popular music studies, music technology, and commercial songwriting, all in pursuit of relevance. Coursework changes over the last decade seek to prepare performance majors to “market themselves, become creative entrepreneurs, and understand how their training can translate to sustainable careers in the new arts economy” (Goodstein, Lapin & McCurdy, 2016). Many of these reforms can be found in public university schools of music, whose curricular offerings are traditionally more expansive than conservatories. Recent scholarship has supported a new paradigm of music entrepreneurship in conservatory-style institutions, widely known as the bastions of the master-apprentice model and technical mastery with no holds barred (Coles & Kalmanovitch, 2025). But this turn, often framed as liberation from classical orthodoxy, too often functions as submission to another orthodoxy: capitalism.

Rather than resisting the commodification of higher education, these music programs have raced to accommodate it, equating vocational preparedness and popular relevance with educational value. At a glance, these reforms seem progressive; they challenge the centrism of the conservatory canon while elevating non-art music genres, and they emphasize marketability. Yet as Richerme (2025) warns us, such moves risk substituting one form of career determinism for another. Progressive music education and “popular music,” she writes, “that center relevance and flexibility, correspond to key aspects of capitalism. Relevant music-making practices often rely on youth culture, cultural omnivorousness, and attention holding, all of which further the capitalist aim of spurring consumption” (Richerme, 2025, p. xi). On the recent college curricular bent toward vocational preparedness, she contends that

calls for more flexible music teaching mirror and reinforce the adaptability needed to maintain employment within contemporary capitalist societies… music educators who provide students a smattering of skills, knowledge, and proficiencies as opposed to deep knowledge in one or two musical practices assist them in developing the depositions needed to be precarious workers. (p. 34)

In some ways, these twenty-first century transformations represent curricular capture more than reform. When educational change is guided primarily by market logics, students are not freed from the constraints of classical professionalization. They are instead retrained to hustle in the name of branding, self-promotion, and content creation.

This critique is not abstract. From the College Music Society’s 2014 report, Transforming Music Study from Its Foundations, to its 2016 follow-up summit, HME reforms have been consistently couched in the language of “twenty-first century skills,” “curricular innovations,” and “career readiness” (Campbell, Myers, & Sarath, 2014; College Music Society, 2016). As HME scholars like Sadler (2021) and Moore (2016) have noted, many of these vocation-oriented reforms do little to consider the political or epistemological function of music in society. They presume the goal of music education is employability, and that the “onus” of employability is a function of the individual’s ability to “craft a marketable solution” to the “systemic failure of a society to care for individuals through collective efforts” (p. 151). Sadler’s most pressing critique against recent curricular reform is perhaps that “entrepreneurship education serves a deliberate function in a neoliberal capitalist system of reproduction: it develops subjects of the system who believe their very value to society is to generate capital self-sufficiently” (p. 151).

The results of career-oriented curricular change are ambivalent at best, as many musicians reluctantly adopt the entrepreneurial label out of gig economy necessity rather than intrinsic desire (Albinsson, 2018; Haynes & Marshall, 2017). Programs in music industry studies and entrepreneurship now exist in both schools of music and conservatories, although not universally, yet graduates often find themselves in positions just as precarious as their classically trained peers. As Sadler (2021) reminds us, “neoliberalism as embodied in the application of entrepreneurship education at music conservatories and schools of music represents the apex of the process of developing students into adherents of a harmful philosophy,” producing graduates who “reinforce a harmful socioeconomic system by advancing the hierarchical mythologies of that system” (pp. 148-149). In other words, music schools are, at times, teaching students to succeed in a system that is already failing them.

The Liberal Arts as Democratic Urgency

Long before a college education was framed as a pipeline to employment, the liberal arts offered something more radical: a preparation for human freedom. Rooted in ancient traditions, the artes liberales—grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy—were conceived not as vocational tools but as intellectual disciplines necessary for living a meaningful, ethical, and civically engaged life. In the twenty-first century, that foundational ideal has not vanished, but it has been crowded out by credentialism and a post-accountability-movement anxiety over discreetly measurable outcomes. Yet as artificial intelligence grows capable of automating not only tasks, but decisions, it is precisely a humanistic education rooted in dialogue, debate, critical inquiry, and moral reasoning that has become essential again.

Scholars, deans, and university presidents abound have recently renewed the clarion call for the liberal arts (Todd, 2024; Frey, 2025). In A Case for the Liberal Arts in the Age of AI, Todd (2024) purports that the liberal arts teach students to “grapple with difficult questions. They learn to look at challenges from multiple perspectives. They practice historical understanding, ethical reasoning, textual analysis,” skills that, “in the age of AI, will help us build a more human future.” These are not soft skills; they are civic technologies. At a time when democratic norms are unraveling and epistemic chaos reigns over media illiteracy, the capacity to parse complex arguments, engage conflicting perspectives, and make decisions guided by principle are societal sine qua nons.

Yet institutions of higher learning are, as Frank Bruni (2025) puts it, “as imprudent [as they are] unimaginative” by sacking the humanities in favor of preprofessional studies. He continues: reminding us that “the modern job market has a flux and furious metabolism that routinely make a mockery of the best-laid plans.” Rather than defending the value of meaning-making and deliberation, universities have often capitulated to the logic of productivity and profit, but those logics are beginning to shift. And when students no longer see a meaningful difference between their university and a skills bootcamp, we should not be surprised that they disengage. Ironically, some research indicates that while similarities outweigh differences in medical school applicants, liberal arts graduates, more so than their non-liberal arts peers, “benefit from an educational breadth well-suited for practicing the art of medicine” (Stratton, Elam, McGrath, 2003, p. 59).

For music education, these stakes are especially urgent. Music was one of the original liberal arts—not merely entertainment or vocational craft, but a mode of knowing. We do not need more musicians trained to adapt to the gig economy. We instead need musicians equipped to imagine new publics and new sociocultural ways of being. We need music educators who can situate their students in ever-changing contexts and speak to music’s place in the world. And while twelve-tone row analysis is certainly a worthwhile academic practice, perhaps exposure to literature and sociology is just as prudent for the aspiring high school band director citizen. Jones (2007) has posited that the field of music education is at odds with a changing world, and it must evolve in turn to address the objectification and commodification of music, the impact of globalization on society, including issues surrounding “world music” and social and community decay, and the evolution of the US economy into one based on creativity instead of heavy industry. While these larger global trends are beyond the scope of this essay, the liberal arts—musical and otherwise—remain one of the few pedagogical traditions capable of grappling with such cross-disciplinary complexity, cultivated through deep reading, debate, performance, perspective taking, and criticality.

Reclaiming the B.A. in Music for a New Era

At the risk of sounding cliché, HME stands at a crossroads. While artificial intelligence reshapes the landscape of work and as universities continue their slow drift toward vocational genuflection, the question before us is no longer how to make music education more relevant, but how to make it more human. In this new milieu, the B.A. in music emerges not as a lesser or fallback option, but as an intellectually, artistically, and ethically compelling degree for the next generation of citizen musicians.

To be clear: the B.A. should not represent a compromise on musical excellence. Students in B.A. programs can and do study with the same world-class faculty in the same applied lessons, and they perform the same repertoire in the same ensembles at the same concert halls. What sets the B.A. apart is not a deficit of rigor but a surplus of humanistic possibility. It enables cross- and interdisciplinary study across literature, politics, philosophy, and the sciences. It resists the vocational siloing that too often limits students' imaginations and identities to narrow professional roles. Music faculty at liberal arts schools report high-level musicianship and serious scholarly study among their music majors, with many students conducting original research (Levine, 2014). In her work with music faculty at schools of liberal arts, Levine (2014) reports “pliant” curricular offerings that allow greater student choice, and an “interdisciplinary orientation” that enables students to “develop and demonstrate competencies in diverse musical idioms and in extended, collaborative research” (p. 4). The B.A. music major has the capacity to expand student opportunity beyond performance into other applications and settings.

This broader framework is especially urgent now. As Jennifer Frey (2025) writes, “a liberal education… does not attempt to prepare students for any career but equips them to fashion meaningful and deeply fulfilling lives” by way of achieving a “modicum of self-knowledge and wisdom about our humanity.” In the face of algorithmic culture, disinformation, and democratic fragility, students need an education that teaches them not merely how to succeed, but how to discern, reflect, listen, and act with moral clarity. Music, long relegated to the periphery of the so-called “practical” disciplines, has the chance to lead in the name of liberal education.

We should remember, too, that no acclaimed novelist holds a Bachelor of Writing, nor does any successful policy analyst earn a Bachelor of Public Policy. They might study English, history, political science, philosophy, or even music—liberal arts disciplines that teach them how to think, argue, synthesize, and hone a craft. The same can be true for musicians. A modern music education can and ought to go beyond the popular music ensemble and digital audio workstation class, just as it should extend beyond traditional band and orchestra mediums.

Considering the B.A. Curriculum

A comparison of the B.M. and B.A. degree plans at the University of Texas at Austin, which serves as a representative case of a school of music in a Research 1 university with both pathways, illustrates the subtle yet significant differences in curricular possibilities. Students in the B.A. program receive comprehensive training in music theory, literature, and history; they study with the same faculty and perform in the same ensembles as their B.M. counterparts. Both degrees require applied lessons, core musicianship coursework, and performance credits. However, the B.A. curriculum dedicates space for a secondary field of study and provides elective room for broader academic exploration. It avoids the professional silo of the B.M., allowing students to double-major or minor in fields such as political science, literature, media studies, or philosophy—areas of study that enhance perspective taking, hone communications skills, and broaden thought.

Table 1

A Comparison of B.M. and B.A. degree requirements at the University of Texas at Austin

This side-by-side comparison reveals an important truth: the B.A. is not a diluted version of the B.M., but a different model altogether that integrates high-level musicking within a liberal arts framework. To be clear: the curricula presented above are not from a liberal arts college (LAC), but a school of music within a flagship public research university. Still, the B.A. option fosters many of the attributes of a LAC: a well-rounded education in the arts, humanities, sciences, and social sciences.

Specifically within liberal arts colleges, music majors often receive deeper, more integrative intellectual preparation, enabling them to

build portfolios that they can present to potential employers or graduate school admissions personnel in any field. Furthermore, the musical and social networks students develop through these experiences become the foundation for sustainable lives in music after graduation, regardless of whether or not the student remains in the field in a professional capacity. (Levine, 2014, p. 4)

One might argue I am taking aim at my own team by suggesting students enroll in fewer music theory and musicology courses in favor of taking courses outside the music major. It is indeed true that in the B.A. track, students might be required to matriculate through three or four music theory courses rather than four to five, and in their stead, pursue coursework in, for example, environmental studies, theology, or communications. My belief is that by marketing and recruiting the music B.A. as a liberal arts focused degree with wide application, we can in fact bolster music program enrollments and revenues (see sample degree plan in Table 2). Students, according to Frey (2025), crave immersive study in the liberal arts, made manifest in “intentional community” and “wisdom as the common goal.” She argues that the problem with liberal education is not the students—“kids these days” is indeed a timeless generational gripe—but with the “administrative class that is content to offer students far less than their own humanity calls for.” If we buy into the urgency of the arts, the liberal arts, and humanistic traditions, our students stand at the ready.

Table 2

Sample 4-year plan: B.A. in music with a psychology minor and secondary study in history

Note. This degree plan assumes a student takes one applied lesson (1–2 credits) and participates in one ensemble (1 credit) each semester. The four-semester aural skills sequence is paired with a typical core theory curriculum. Psychology minor includes intro, three electives, and a senior seminar or capstone course. History study (as a required secondary field of study) is integrated via general education and upper-division electives. Music electives and capstone work may support performance, composition, education, or scholarship.

I believe the B.A. degree is honest about the evolving professional realities of music and the urgent needs of our democratic society. While the B.M. often assumes a narrower career trajectory in the Western art music industry, the B.A. provides students with the capacity to pivot into arts administration, media production, music therapy, education, civic leadership, or myriad graduate programs. I offer this not in the name of return on investment, but in the humanistic nature of the liberal education that translates to a civically and intellectually compelling existence. The purpose of college is not merely to produce specialists, but to “cultivate a love of truth for its own sake and the courage to speak our minds and to follow the truth wherever it may lead us” (Frey, 2025).

Of course, we know that students can achieve liberally minded virtues through a B.M. course of study in the same way that B.A. students can attain technical performance virtuosity. My hope is this: for faculty, administrators, and students alike to reorient our perspectives on music degree offerings in the academe. Doing so will open access to a greater number of prospective students, thereby boosting enrollment, and diversify possibilities for graduates. The B.A. in music should not be seen as a fallback for those unable to “cut it” in a professional music major. It should be marketed and expanded at tertiary institutions as a viable and worthwhile pathway—a degree that cultivates excellence in musicianship and fluency in the wider intellectual and civic conversations that define our time. The B.A. offers a model of education that is not only responsive to our current moment, but generative of a better one. It prepares students not just to make a living, but to contribute significantly and sincerely to the democratic project.

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