Generally speaking, musicians with advanced degrees in instrumental performance can teach either in pre-college or academic settings. Having worked in both, as an adjunct at a conservatory and a professor at Oclef, I’d like to share some observations from each.

If you are a conservatory trained musician like me, then your coursework, lessons, and curriculum were designed to prepare you for an academic job. Of course, a musician’s life is rarely a straight line from graduation to tenure-track employment. In fact, a variety of factors have made securing a full-time academic position today more difficult than ever:

1. Credential inflation

30 years ago musicians could secure a faculty position with only a master’s or bachelor’s degree. Now, job applications demand a doctoral degree at the bare minimum. This rise in credential requirements has added at least three years to a lengthy academic career, and offers few guarantees to graduates entering the job market.

2. Enrollment cliff

According to the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, degree granting institutions are facing an enrollment cliff, in which the number of high school graduates is set to peak in 2025 and decline 13% by 2041. A strong predictive indicator is the fact that K-12 institutions are already grappling with a decline in enrollments. The obvious implication is a reduction in the number of full-time faculty positions as enrollment declines. In fact, we are already seeing full-time roles get cut now in 2025, at the supposed enrollment peak, which brings me to:

3. Adjunctification

Adjunctification is the trend of academic institutions replacing full-time faculty positions with part-time adjunct roles. A recent AAUP report shows the proportion of tenure-track to contingent appointments has shifted to the latter in recent years. Notably, the report shows total faculty employment has recovered from Covid-19 levels, while the number of full-time roles has decreased. 

Many have covered the Plight of Adjunct Faculty. Briefly, an adjunct role offers teaching experience and enhanced credibility for recent graduates, but the trade-offs are severe: adjunct roles offer no benefits or insurance, and one semester of poor student ratings (an unreliable assessment of teaching ability) can determine whether or not a contract is renewed. Worse still, these roles offer no pathway to advancement, either within the employer’s institution or externally.

All this is to say most doctoral graduates will find it hard to secure an academic appointment. Rather than bemoan the state of higher-ed and our role in it, I think musicians should see the opportunity we have in the pre-college sphere to create exciting and innovative schools. There are so many musicians with a high level of expertise who want a platform to share it. At Oclef, we are devoted to creating such a space for the benefit of our teachers, students, and community. We want to empower those musicians who have gone through the conservatory system and face an insecure job market.

I would argue that music degrees are unusually specialized, even in academia, which is innately geared towards specialization. A musician enters their bachelors to study classical piano, not classical guitar or violin, composition or improvisation, commercial music or ethnomusicology. This is why I have to say ‘no, I do not play an instrument other than piano,' to strangers, and why classical pianists dread playing Happy Birthday at parties — many of us can’t improvise (although several of my Oclef colleagues are exceptions to this stereotype).

What conservatory pianists can do is refine great works of music into polished performances, and have the practical, theoretical and cultural understanding to play with great insight. I do believe this is important. Music performance, like great literature, visual art, or architecture is a historical practice and a tradition worth preserving. However, it is only one small part of the musical world. 

By contrast, Oclef’s curriculum explores a wider array of musical skills. We are not preparing our students to be music professors, but music lovers and life-long learners. Yes, we are a piano-only school, but we may take one month off from preparing solo music to focus on composition or arranging. We hold world music concerts where students explore their culture through music and cuisine. Our faculty are free to create pop courses, or improvisation courses if they so wish. Of course, we are also able to support a student who wants to prepare for a conservatory audition or competition, but it's not the only path we offer.

If you wanted to create a more diverse, interdisciplinary curriculum for performance majors than the one described above, it would require coordinating separate departments within a conservatory. Unfortunately, there is little interaction or cooperative agenda setting between a conservatory's, jazz, composition, and classical performance faculty, to take a few examples.

To share a personal experience, one of my adjunct roles was teaching keyboard literature, a survey class for piano performance majors. Many of the concepts covered were interdisciplinary — students got to know the subject from a historical, theoretical, and pianistic perspective. However, I had no opportunity to share my observations and experiences with other departments (admittedly, this could be because of my adjunct status – I didn’t attend faculty meetings). Some of my students struggled with theory concepts (what is binary form, sonata-rondo form etc) while others struggled with writing skills, like organizing an essay. I knew these topics were covered in other remedial courses within the conservatory, but had no overlap with them. This meant I could not shape my teaching strategy to synergize with those courses.

Outside of interdepartmental exchange, curriculum reform may also face resistance within a single department, where opinion can split between more conservative and experimental faculty members. Even when a department can reach internal consensus, long-term strategic choices must be approved by the administration, who are themselves beholden to boards of trustees and external influences. 

At Oclef, the business is smaller in scale and flatter in hierarchy. This means if I notice a potential improvement, I can raise it to the company founders and get an immediate, thoughtful response. Then, my suggestion might be implemented or folded into an ongoing innovation within our larger curriculum. 

For example, we are currently developing a new course called foundations theory. If I notice my students struggling with a particular subject, I can suggest an adjustment to our theory coordinator, Matthew, who either implements it immediately, or gives me the tools to do so myself. 

In another instance, I noticed my students were struggling to reach practice goals in their scales and technique assignments. I proposed a solution to our co-founder (co-creating a technique textbook), who listened sympathetically but explained the school was implementing an alternative solution to the problem. This solution (an interactive recording and practice checklist) was introduced  two weeks later and successfully addressed my students’ problems. Through this interaction, I learned that:

1: I had the opportunity to voice ideas

2: My thoughts were given consideration

3: Solutions were implemented that, while not what I had personally suggested, fixed the issue

This all points to an iterative process wherein faculty, students, and even student families can air their thoughts and collectively shape the school curriculum. The result is a rapidly evolving school structure which is always improving according to the direct needs of those it serves. 

These have been some of my thoughts about the difference between private school and conservatory cultures, and college vs pre-college teaching. If you found it useful or want to comment, please contact me at justin@oclef.com. Thank you for reading.